Chapter Eleven
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The pit of Magdalene’s stomach hollowed out at the sight of empty library shelves and the mass of books that had been summarily tossed on the floor. Daunt stood beside her, silent while she took in the scene. Whoever had done this had stood on the second level and let books fall where they might, including all the way to the bottom floor.
She took several steps forward and bent over one of the piles. The damage was appalling. The spines of some of the books were broken, and books that had landed open and facedown on the pile had pages that were bent or torn.
She looked at Daunt, quite sure that she wore the same grim, ashen expression as he. “What sort of hell spawn treats books like this?”
“If I were to answer you, my language would be unfit for your ears and unworthy of a gentleman.”
“Do you know how this happened? Were there not servants on guard?”
“Gomes and another servant arrived to relieve the men stationed here. Both the servants outside the library were on the floor and insensate. They appear to have been drugged. When Gomes opened the door—it had been barricaded from the inside, but he is nothing if not resourceful—he interrupted our thief in the process of wreaking the destruction you see before us.”
She put a hand over her heart. “He captured the culprit?”
“Alas, no. He escaped that way.” He pointed to one of the windows. “But not before bashing Gomes on the head.”
She gaped at Daunt, but he was not as shocked as she that anyone would resort to violence because of a book. “Is Gomes all right? What about the other men on guard? What happened to them?”
“Gomes has a black eye and sore ribs. One of the men who was drugged has awakened and says he remembers nothing from the time he left the servants’ common room until the moment he awoke in bed. The other did not get off as easily. He received a brutal blow to the head. The surgeon says he’ll likely survive, but one never knows.”
“This is horrible, Daunt. Just horrible.”
“It is.” He gripped her shoulder, and she put her hand over his. “I’ve told Gomes to take the day off, but he has refused thus far. Since I know you will ask, the room was dark, and Gomes did not get a good look at our intruder. He did insist that he got in several blows of his own, and I can assure you that if Gomes landed a blow, the recipient feels it as we speak. Badly. Whether he took anything when he fled, we cannot know, but Gomes is certain he did not have a satchel or bag.”
Magdalene felt more than a little ill. She went closer to the decimated shelves. “It’s mostly the ones we haven’t done yet, isn’t it?” she said.
From behind her, Daunt said, “Yes.”
She kept her back to the damaged books, but it wasn’t any better not seeing. She knew they were there, broken and abused. Daunt rubbed his face several times, and she wondered how long he’d been up. She knew for certain he hadn’t slept any more than she. “One of the Dukes would fit in a coat pocket,” he said.
“If he found it, there’s naught we can do.”
“I ought to have posted more guards. We ought to have gone through the books like this.”
“What? Throw them around like this, do you mean?”
“We’d have been finished in half a day.”
She took his hand in hers and ignored the shiver of electricity between them. “It would have killed us both to do something like that, and well you know it. We are up against a true villain, a man who does not scruple to break the law or risk another man’s life, or”—she gestured—“this.”
“He is after the Dukes, after all.” His fingers tightened around hers, and he drew her closer, then pressed a finger of his other hand to the center of her forehead. “I recognize that look. What thoughts are whirling about in that brain of yours?”
“Our intruder must have seen the book he is after.”
“How so?”
Painful as it was to look, she gestured at the jumble of books covering the floor. “One man could not have examined every one of these books, not with the necessary care. He must know the condition of the book he is seeking, the size, the color, and the binding. We may therefore assume, my lord, that any Dukes that were once or still are in this library”—she held up a hand to stop him interrupting—“are not in their original condition. They have been re-bound, and he knows what they look like.”
“The question is, did he find them?”
“Gomes interrupted him. Therefore, he fled before his full task was complete.”
“Or he was interrupted just when he found it.”
“That is a possibility,” she said. “I presume you have someone on the trail of our housebreaker.”
“Of course,” he said.
“No true bibliophile would do this.”
He picked up a book that had been damaged by a much heavier one falling on it. Half of one page was missing. “A philistine. A barbarian.”
“One wonders whether we should continue to consider Mrs. Taylor a suspect,” Magdalene said. “She may well have come here because of a false conviction that De Terris Fabulosis is at Plumwood, but is she so devoid of humanity that she would do something like this? That was not my impression of her.”
“I do not know. No one but you has seen this Mrs. Taylor. We know nothing about her. We do not know if she has accomplices who did this, or if this is the work of someone else entirely.”
She brushed a lock of hair off his forehead. He went still, and she let go and stepped back, horrified that she’d taken such a liberty. She stared at the pile of books, at anything but him. When she had herself under control, she said, “I do not see that we have any choice but to proceed on the theory that he, or she, was not successful.”