The nib of Margaret Whitfield's fountain pen touched the cream-colored paper at precisely nine-fifteen in the morning, and she drew it across the surface in a long, deliberate stroke, laying down her signature in the deep blue-black ink she had used for forty years of editorial correspondence. The pen was a vintage Pelikan, its barrel worn to the smoothness of river stone from decades of handling. She had bought it in Hamburg in 1968, the year before she married Geoffrey, and she had written every important letter of her professional life with it, including the rejection notes that had ended careers and the acceptance calls that had launched them, including the condolence letters she still composed, three years after his death, for friends who did not know she had become a widow.
Her study occupied the north wing of the inn, a turreted Victorian structure perched on a granite shelf above the Atlantic. Outside the tall windows, gulls wheeled and cried in the salt wind, their shadows sliding across the clapboards. The room smelled of beeswax and old paper and the faint brine that crept in even when the windows were shut. Bookshelves lined three walls, their contents a working library rather than a decorative one: reference volumes, first editions of authors she had championed, bound galleys from the houses she had once haunted, a small brass clock from Geoffrey's desk that she wound every Sunday morning. A fire burned low in the grate, though it was early October and the room did not strictly require it. Margaret preferred the suggestion of warmth to the reality of cold, a preference she recognized as sentimental and refused to correct.
She had drafted the letter on her laptop the previous afternoon, then printed it, then read it aloud to herself twice, then thrown the printout into the fire and watched the paper blacken and curl. The draft had been competent. Competence was insufficient. Geoffrey had taught her that the only letters worth writing were the ones that cost something, that left a small bruise on the writer as well as the recipient. She had not, in the end, minded the lost hour.
Now she wrote the final version by hand, her script small and precise, the letters formed with the disciplined clarity of a woman who had edited thousands of manuscripts and could not abide a sloppy ascender. The first line gave her more trouble than it should have.
Dear Theodore, she began, and paused.
The nib hovered. A drop of ink gathered at its tip, darkening, threatening to fall. She lowered it carefully to the inkwell and resumed.
Dear Theodore. I am writing to ask a favor of you, which I recognize is an impertinence after so many years of silence between us. The Pemberton Prize requires a fresh pair of eyes this season, and yours are among the few I still trust.
She paused again, this time to consider the rhythm of the sentence. It was a rhythm she had argued for in hundreds of author meetings: the long clause, the pivot, the short declarative landing. Geoffrey had called it her tricolon habit. She smiled faintly at the memory and continued.
The prize, as you know, has been judged since its inception by a single reader, working alone for six weeks in seclusion at my inn on the Maine coast. The tradition has served us well. It has also, I will confess, begun to feel like a vanity. The manuscripts are stronger than they were in Peter's day, and the questions they raise are no longer the questions a single sensibility can answer with confidence. I am asking you to co-judge this season's submissions with a colleague whose name you will recognize when I give it, and whose company, I suspect, will both irritate and instruct you. You will have private rooms. You will have unlimited access to the inn's library, which includes, I should mention, the Ashworth correspondence you inquired about in 1987. I never forgot that letter. I have only been waiting for the right moment to reply to it.
The right moment, she reflected, had arrived in part because of a conversation she had had in August with her cardiologist, who had used the word prudent in a way that Margaret, who distrusted euphemism, had correctly interpreted as warning. She was not ill. She was seventy-two, and her heart had developed a murmur it did not possess five years ago, and the inn's staircase made her pause on the second landing when she used to take it in stride. Six weeks of solitary judging, as she had done every October since 1997, had begun to feel less like a discipline and more like a sentence she was imposing on herself. She wanted company this time. She wanted the prize to outlast her own involvement, and she knew, with the unsentimental clarity that had made her reputation at Houghton and then at Knopf, that outlasting required structure she had not yet built.
She did not write any of this. Geoffrey would have approved.
The remainder of the letter was practical: dates, accommodations, the promise of a stipend that would cover Theodore's travel from Cambridge, the suggestion that he might wish to bring a small library of his own. She closed with a sentence she had rewritten four times in the draft.
I hope you will say yes. I have not, in twenty years, hoped for anything from you with this particular quality of earnestness. Please give my regards to the lamp on your desk that I am told you still keep burning at unreasonable hours.
Margaret, she signed, and set the letter aside to dry.
The second letter would be harder. She could feel the difficulty waiting for her, the way one feels a staircase descending into darkness even before one sees the bottom. She unscrewed the cap of the Pelikan, took a fresh sheet of paper, and began.
Dear Camille.
Two words, and already she was navigating. Theodore was a man she had known for forty years, whose vanities and vulnerabilities she had catalogued with the tender ruthlessness of an editor who respected his talent and despaired of his temperament. Camille Devereaux she had met only twice, both times at professional gatherings where the conversation had been constrained by the presence of others, and both times she had come away with the impression of a woman whose courtesy was a polished surface over depths Margaret could not plumb. The bookshop in the rue de Tournon. The brother's manuscript, which had been the subject of whispers at the Bibliotheque nationale for fifteen years and which Camille had never, to Margaret's knowledge, permitted to be read by anyone outside her immediate family. The nephew, Julian, who had left McGill under circumstances that produced no scandal and no explanation, only a quiet resignation and a move to Paris.
Margaret had not been angling for any of this. She had been, until the August conversation, perfectly content to run the prize as she always had, a single judge and six weeks of her own company and the satisfaction of choosing, each November, the book that would bear her late husband's name. The shift had come when she reread, on a rainy afternoon in September, the manuscript that had won the prize in 2003, and found that she could not, in good conscience, defend her original choice against the two runners-up. The book was still good. The others were better. She had been wrong, and she had been alone in her wrongness, and she did not intend to be wrong again.
Dear Camille, she wrote again, more slowly this time, choosing each word with the particular care one uses when writing to a person who notices everything and forgives little.
I hope you will forgive the suddenness of this letter, and the presumption of its request. I have followed your work at the shop and, before that, your restoration of the Verlaine papers at the Bibliotheque, with the admiration of someone who has only ever edited books rather than saved them. The Pemberton Prize, which I have the honor of administering in memory of my late husband, requires a co-judge for the upcoming season, and I am writing to ask if that person might be you.
She paused, took a sip of the tea that had gone cold beside her, and grimaced. Cold tea. Another small defeat. She set the cup down and continued.
The work would involve six weeks of residence at my inn in Maine, beginning in mid-October. You would share the judging with a colleague I have also invited, whose name and reputation you know, and whose methods I suspect will occasionally exasperate you. I will not name him here, because I would prefer you to accept the commission without prejudice, or to refuse it without the excuse of his name. If you wish to know before you reply, write to me at the address above and I will tell you. Otherwise, consider only the work itself: the reading of approximately one hundred and forty manuscripts submitted this season, the deliberation, the selection of a winner to be announced at a small ceremony in June. The stipend is modest but, I hope, not insulting. The rooms are quiet. The library is considerable. You would have access, as well, to a small collection of Verlaine holographs that Geoffrey acquired in 1979 and that I have not, until now, found the occasion to share with anyone who might properly value them.
Margaret stopped. The mention of the Verlaine papers had been an impulse, and she sat with it for a moment, turning it over. Camille would recognize the offer for what it was: a gesture of trust extended in advance of any being earned. A door opened before the guest had knocked. It was the kind of gesture Geoffrey would have made, and she had watched him make it, and she had learned from him that such gestures, when correctly placed, changed the terms of every subsequent exchange. She let the sentence stand.
She finished the letter with a paragraph about Julian.
I understand your nephew has joined you at the shop, and I am glad of it. I mention this only because, if you accept, you will be away from Paris for six weeks, and I wished you to know that the inn can accommodate a guest of yours, should he wish to escape his own responsibilities for a portion of that time. I mention it also because I have a weakness for bookshops run by people who actually read. Please give him my regards when you next see him, though I suspect he will not remember our brief meeting at the Bibliotheque in 2015. I remember it. He was reading, in a corner, a book he did not wish to be interrupted in. I have always liked that about him.
She signed the second letter with the same flourish she had given the first, blotted both pages carefully with the antique blotter Geoffrey had bought her at a fair in Bath, and laid them side by side on the desk to dry.
Outside, a gull screamed. The fire shifted in the grate, sending a brief tongue of flame up around a knot of oak. Margaret sat back in her chair and regarded the two letters as though they were two small animals she had just delivered and was not yet certain were breathing.
She thought of Theodore in his Cambridge house, surrounded by his unfinished edition, by the correspondence of a nineteenth-century poet whose name Margaret could not bring herself to type even now because she had been the one, forty-three years ago, to suggest to Geoffrey that the Ashworth project would be the making of his career and the unmaking of his happiness. She had been right on both counts. She had not warned him.
She thought of Camille in her shop on the rue de Tournon, where the light came in sideways through tall windows and the smell of old leather was so constant it had become, for those who worked there, a kind of silence. She thought of the brother's manuscript, unread, guarded, a presence Camille carried the way a person carries a letter they have not yet decided whether to burn or send.
She thought of Julian, whom she had met for less than ten minutes in a reading room in Paris, and who had looked up from his book with an expression she had recognized at once: the expression of a person who had been doing something they were not yet ready to explain.
She picked up her cold tea, considered it, and set it down again.
In the morning, she would walk the letters to the post office in the village and entrust them to a mail truck that would carry one across the Atlantic and the other down the coast to Massachusetts. She could, of course, have sent them by courier, or by electronic means, or by any of the modern conveniences that would have delivered her words in hours rather than weeks. She chose the slower route because she had learned, over seventy-two years, that the important letters arrived when they were ready to, and not before, and that the waiting was part of the writing.
The fire burned down. The gulls wheeled. The ink dried on two identical sheets of cream paper, and Margaret Whitfield sat at her desk and listened to the house settle around her, the way houses do at the end of summer, when they begin to remember that winter is coming.
The Pemberton Prize had arrived three weeks earlier, in an envelope thick enough to contain not only the formal letterhead but a small brass token of the kind the foundation sent to distinguished recipients, a weighty disc that Theodore had set on his desk and not touched since.
It sat there now, beside a stack of student essays he had agreed to read for a former colleague, beside a cup of tea that had gone cold while he annotated a footnote on page four hundred and twelve of his own unfinished edition. The study smelled of pipe tobacco and binding glue, of the particular mustiness that accumulates in a room where ten thousand books have been allowed to breathe for half a century. Late September light came through the bay window at a slant, catching dust motes and the gilt spines of his first editions.
Mira Vance let herself in with the key he had given her two Septembers ago, set her bag on the leather chair that bore the permanent impression of his late wife's afternoon reading, and said without preamble, "You threw it away."
"I did not throw it away." Theodore did not look up from the footnote. His pen moved in its careful, almost calligraphic hand. "I placed it in the bin, which is a different thing."
"Garbage is garbage, Professor."
"It is recycling, actually. The foundation sends very nice paper."
Mira dropped into the chair across from him, crossed her legs, and waited. She had learned in the first month of her assistantship that Theodore Ashworth would fill a silence if you let him, and would also refuse to fill it if you pressed. The trick was to sit just long enough.
"You could have at least framed the token," she said.
"I have no wall for it."
"You have four walls."
"Four walls, and on three of them, books. On the fourth, a window. There is no place for a brass disc commemorating an award I have not earned."
Mira leaned forward. "You have earned it. That's the whole point. The Pemberton goes to a lifetime of work on a single corpus. You've spent forty years on Ashworth's edition. You've practically lived inside the poet's mailbox."
"Ashworth," Theodore murmured, and a small smile moved across his face, the way a breeze moves across the surface of a pond. "We do not share a name, you understand. The poet was merely fond of the same initial. I was born to it."
"I know." Mira had made this correction once, in her first week, and never again. "But the committee doesn't care. They care that you've produced the definitive scholarly edition of a major 19th-century correspondence. They care that no one else has come close. They care that you're eighty-one and still working."
Theodore set down his pen. He took off his reading glasses and folded them with the deliberateness of a man who has nowhere else to be. "Mira. Child. I am not receiving a prize for being old."
"You're receiving it for being irreplaceable."
"Prize committees do not use the word irreplaceable."
"They imply it."
Theodore regarded her over the desk. She had come to him as a doctoral candidate with a question about the poet's letter to Lady Pemberton in 1843, and had stayed because, as she once put it, she could not find anyone else who took the work as seriously as she did. That had been two years ago. She had stopped being a child somewhere in the middle of it, though he still occasionally used the word, the way he still occasionally wore the tie his wife had given him on their last anniversary, out of a private stubbornness.
"I have not earned it," he said again. "The edition is unfinished. The annotations stop in 1851. There are seven hundred and forty-two letters I have not yet touched. The Pemberton Prize does not go to an incomplete project."
"It does if the incomplete project is the only one that matters."
"That is not how prizes work."
"It is exactly how prizes work. Look at Morrison. Look at Naipaul. Half of them were halfway through something else."
Theodore made a small, dismissive sound. "I am not Morrison."
"No, you're Theodore Ashworth, which is also not nothing."
He stood up. The study was not large, but he moved through it as though it were a great hall, his hand trailing along the spines of books he had read so often he could identify them by touch. He went to the window and looked out at the maple tree that had been turning, week by week, from green to gold. Beyond it, the roofs of Cambridge. Beyond that, the Atlantic, and somewhere across it, a woman in Cape Cod who had been his editor once, and might, if he were lucky, be writing to him now.
"They will think I am a coward," he said quietly.
Mira uncrossed her legs. "Who will think that?"
"The committee. The field. Margaret. Everyone who ever sat through one of my lectures and waited for me to say the thing I was actually thinking."
"So don't refuse. Accept it. Write them back. Tell them you'll come to the ceremony in November and you'll make a speech about the letters you haven't annotated, and you'll make everyone in the room feel like a slacker, and then you'll come home and go back to work."
"That," Theodore said, "is a great deal of speechifying for an old man who prefers his study."
"I know. I'll write it for you."
Theodore turned from the window. The light caught his face in a way that made him look both younger and older than he was, the lines around his mouth deepening into something that was almost a smile. "You would presume to write my speech?"
"I would presume to write your speech, your acceptance, your thank-you notes, and possibly your memoirs, given enough time and grant funding."
He sat back down. He picked up the brass token and turned it over in his fingers. It was heavier than it looked. He thought of the poet, long dead, who had also spent forty years on a project he never finished, and who had written, in a letter to a friend, that the great works of the world are not the ones that are completed but the ones that are attempted.
"Pemberton," he said, testing the word. "I have the Bancroft. I have the Lowell. I have the British Academy fellowship. I have, if I am not mistaken, a shelf in Widener that they cannot dismantle because too many of my former students have inscribed their dissertations to me."
"You do."
"Pemberton is the only one I have not received."
"Yes."
"And you think it would look like cowardice if I refused."
"I think it would look like cowardice, and I think you know it would, and I think the reason you put it in the recycling was because you knew it would."
Theodore set the token back on the desk. It made a small, definitive sound against the wood. He looked at Mira for a long moment, the way he had looked at her on the day she arrived with her question about the 1843 letter, with the expression of a man who has just realized that the student before him is going to be a problem and also, possibly, a colleague.
"You are a great nuisance," he said.
"I know."
"I will need a new suit."
"I'll get you one."
"Not black. I look like a crow in black."
"Crow is distinguished."
"I look like a crow who has been to a funeral."
Mira laughed. The sound was sudden and unguarded, and it startled a small bird that had been sitting on the sill outside the window. Theodore felt, for the first time in weeks, something that was not quite pleasure and not quite dread, but somewhere in the territory between them.
He picked up his pen again. "We have work to do. Page four hundred and twelve is not going to annotate itself."
"You just agreed to a prize."
"I agreed to a suit. The prize is a separate negotiation."
Mira pulled her notebook out of her bag and opened it to the page where she had been keeping, for the past three weeks, a list of reasons Theodore Ashworth should accept the Pemberton. The list was three pages long. She folded it shut.
"Page four hundred and twelve," she said. "What's on it?"
He told her. She listened. Outside, the maple leaves turned, and the mail truck that had carried Margaret Whitfield's letter down from Cape Cod was somewhere on the road between Sandwich and Cambridge, and in a bookshop in Paris, a man named Julian Devereaux was opening a letter of his own, and the morning was not yet half over.
Julian Devereaux stood behind the counter of the shop on rue Bonaparte, a letter opener in his right hand and a cup of espresso going cold at his elbow. The morning light fell through the window in a pale, oblique wedge, catching the dust that rose from the spines of the books he had been shelving since seven. He could smell the ink and the old glue, and beneath them, faintly, the lavender his aunt Camille kept in the drawers of the front desk.
The envelope was heavy. Cream stock, deep burgundy ink, a return address he did not recognize at first. Then he turned it over and saw the small engraved crest, and he understood.
He did not open it immediately.
He set the letter opener down. He picked up his espresso, took a sip that had gone bitter, and set it down again. He looked at the envelope the way one looks at a diagnosis, or a letter from a former lover, or a bill one cannot pay. With the particular stillness of a man deciding what kind of truth he is prepared to carry.
His aunt would be downstairs in the conservation room. She would have heard him come in. She would be waiting, with the patience of someone who has spent thirty years around rare paper, for him to come down and tell her what was in the post.
Julian slid the blade of the opener under the flap.
The letter inside was printed on stationery so thick it had its own weight. He read the first paragraph standing up. He read the second paragraph sitting on the stool behind the counter, because his knees had decided, without consulting him, that this was a seated matter.
The Pemberton Prize for Literary Scholarship. The selection committee. The shortlist of three names. His own, in the middle.
He read it again, in case the first reading had been a hallucination, or a courtesy nomination that would turn out, on closer inspection, to be a different kind of invitation. It was not. It was exactly what it said.
Julian folded the letter once, and then again, and slid it back into the envelope. He put the envelope in the inside pocket of his jacket, which was hanging on the hook by the door, and he stood there for a moment with his hand flat against his chest, feeling the rectangular shape of it through the wool.
He thought of the last time he had been shortlisted for anything. It had been for a tenure-track position at McGill, and the letter had come on cheaper paper, and he had not been shortlisted. He had been waitlisted. He had gone to Montreal anyway, and Montreal had kept him for seven years, and then Montreal had let him go, and he had come back to Paris to help his aunt in the shop, and that had been nine years ago.
He thought of his uncle. He thought of the unfinished manuscript in the safe in the back room, which his aunt kept the way other people kept photographs of the dead.
He thought of Theodore Ashworth.
The name in the other envelope he had opened earlier had not been Ashworth. The name had been a younger scholar at Yale, whose work Julian respected but did not love. The name in the Pemberton envelope was Ashworth.
Julian went downstairs.
Camille Devereaux was at the worktable in the conservation room, with a sheet of Japanese tissue and a jar of wheat starch paste, and a folio of letters from the 1840s spread out before her on a sheet of Mylar. She did not look up when Julian came in. She had the gift, which she had taught him by example and never by lecture, of knowing when a visitor to the back of the shop had news, and of letting the news wait until the paste
The paste had been brushed onto the tissue in a thin, even layer, and Camille was holding the sheet aloft, letting it cure for the thirty seconds it needed before it would adhere properly. The letters from the 1840s sat on the Mylar, their ink dark under the cool light of the work lamp. One of them had been folded into quarters for a hundred and seventy years, and the crease had cracked the paper along its length, and Camille had been working on it for three days.
She set the tissue down. She looked at Julian.
"Well?" she said.
Julian held up the envelope. He did not need to say anything else. The cream color of the stock, the black engraved return address, the heavy paper, these were all things his aunt would recognize as quickly as he did, because she had grown up in the same trade, because she had once been the conservator at the Bibliothèque nationale, because the language of certain institutions was a language they both spoke.
Camille's hand, which had been resting on the jar of paste, lifted and settled again. She did not reach for the envelope. She folded the tissue carefully, aligning the corners with the edge of the worktable, and set it aside.
"Pemberton," she said.
"Yes."
"And the name?"
Julian came further into the room. He set the envelope on the Mylar, next to the 1840s letters, where the lamp would catch the engraving. He watched his aunt's face.
"Mine," he said. "For the Baudelaire book."
He watched the information travel across her features. It arrived at her eyes before it arrived anywhere else. He saw her register the fact that he had been shortlisted, that the book she had helped him research, the book he had finished two years ago and had not been able to place with a university press, the book that had been his best work and his least rewarded, had at last been seen by someone who mattered.
"Good," she said, simply.
Then, because she was his aunt and because she had raised him in the trade, she asked the next question.
"Who else?"
Julian hesitated. He did not want to say the name. He did not want to put the name into the room where his uncle's manuscript was kept, where his uncle's correspondence was catalogued, where his uncle's unfinished annotated edition of the same poet Julian had written about sat in a safe behind a painting of a river.
He told her anyway.
"Ashworth."
Camille did not move. The work lamp hummed. The 1840s letters lay under their sheet of Mylar, waiting to be repaired. The paste smelled faintly of wheat, and beneath that, of the archival paper, and beneath that, of the old leather of the folio that had held them for a century and a half.
Camille looked at Julian, and Julian saw that she had known. He could not have said how he knew this. He only knew it from the way she did not react. There was no surprise in her face. There was only the careful, practiced stillness of a person who had been carrying a particular weight for a long time, and who had just felt it shift.
"His book on the letters," Camille said. "The annotated edition he has been working on for forty years."
"Yes."
"Your uncle's notes are in that safe, Julian."
"I know."
She turned back to the worktable. She picked up the tissue again, and began to align it with the cracked fold of the 1840s letter. Her hands were steady. They had always been steady, even when she had been young and even when she had been afraid, and Julian could not remember a time when his aunt's hands had not been the steadiest thing in the room.
"Your uncle wrote to Ashworth," Camille said. "Not often. Four letters, perhaps five, over the course of twenty years. The last one was sent the week before he died, and it was never answered."
Julian sat down on the stool by the conservation sink. He did not speak. He waited.
"I have read those letters," Camille said. "I have read them many times. Your uncle believed that Ashworth was the only scholar alive who understood the poet the way he did. He believed that the annotated edition, when Ashworth finished it, would be the definitive work for a generation. He also believed that Ashworth would never finish it."
She pressed the tissue down along the crease. The paste held. She smoothed the surface with a bone folder, working from the center outward.
"He believed this," she said, "because Ashworth had already been working on it for thirty years when your uncle first wrote to him, and because the poet's widow had not yet released all of the letters, and because Ashworth was a man who could not bring himself to write the introduction."
"Why not?"
Camille looked up. Her face, which had been focused on the work, was suddenly tired in a way that had nothing to do with the hour or the labor.
"Because," she said, "the introduction required him to write about his own marriage. And he could not do it. Not yet. Not then."
Julian thought of the envelope in his pocket. He thought of the other envelope, the one with the Yale scholar's name, which he had read and reread and could not feel. He thought of the unfinished annotated edition, which had been Ashworth's project for forty years and was, in its way, his uncle's unfinished business too. He thought of his own Baudelaire book, which had taken him seven years and which had been, in its quieter way, an attempt to finish a conversation that his uncle had started with a man he had never met.
"If I win," Julian said, "I will be introduced to him at the ceremony. The Pemberton gives the winner and the runner-up a dinner with the previous laureates. Ashworth won in 1987."
"Yes," Camille said.
"And if he asks me about my family, I will have to tell him about my uncle."
"Yes."
"And if I tell him about my uncle, he will ask me about the manuscript."
Camille set the bone folder down. She folded the tissue back, exposing the cracked fold of the 1840s letter. She did not look at Julian.
"He will ask you," she said, "because your uncle wrote to him. Because the letters exist. Because Ashworth is old, Julian. He is eighty-three. He has outlived his wife. He has outlived his colleagues. He has, I suspect, outlived his reasons for not finishing the introduction."
She looked up.
"If you win, I think you should tell him the truth. That your uncle left an annotated edition. That the edition is unfinished. That it has been in a safe in this shop for nine years, waiting for someone to come and ask about it."
Julian felt the weight of the safe behind the painting of the river. He felt the weight of the four or five letters that had been sent and the one that had not been answered. He felt the weight of his own Baudelaire book, which had been his best work, and which was, in its quieter way, a kind of overture.
"And if I lose," he said.
"Then you will not be introduced to him," Camille said. "And he will go on not finishing the edition. And the manuscript will go on waiting."
She turned back to the worktable. She picked up the tissue again.
"But I do not think you will lose," she said.
Julian sat on the stool. He listened to the hum of the work lamp. He smelled the wheat paste and the old paper and, beneath both, the faint smell of his aunt's soap, which was the smell of the shop and the smell of his childhood and the smell of every difficult conversation he had ever had in this room.
He thought of Theodore Ashworth, eighty-three years old, sitting in a house in Cambridge, surrounded by forty years of notes on a poet he had loved and could not yet write about. He thought of his uncle, who had believed in Ashworth's edition and had not lived to see it finished. He thought of the letter in his pocket, which was an invitation to a dinner he had not yet been to, and which was, in its way, the beginning of a conversation that had been waiting thirty years to happen.
He thought of Mira Vance, who had called his book important, and who had been the first person in years to say so.
"All right," he said. "Then I will not lose."
Camille did not look up. She pressed the tissue down along the crease. The paste held. The 1840s letter lay whole beneath her hands.
"Then we will wait," she said, "and see."