I looked at myself in the full-length mirror and lifted one corner of my mouth. The look was perfect, if a bit performative. A long velvet coat that cinched at my waist, black leggings meeting maroon boots that were not quite a match to the coat, and a top hat bedecked with a dark red ribbon. I looked just enough steampunk and just enough Victorian to take joy in my own attire. “Looking good, Poe Baxter,” I said, reminding myself who I was.
This outfit was so different from my usual linen dresses or jeans with floral blouses. Today, I was stepping into the bookish part of my persona, which felt ideal. This was, after all, the first day of my new career.
Just six weeks ago, I was an English professor, one whose teaching my students enjoyed (if their reviews were to be believed). I cared a great deal about my students—perhaps too much—but I had grown weary of committee meetings and esoteric discussions about literary theory. Even more, I had gotten tired of grading papers. Oh, so very tired.
So, a year ago, I told my department chairs I was resigning. I didn’t want to leave them with courses to cover and no new faculty member to teach them. Now, after a year that seemed it might never end, I was starting up my new business as a book finder. It was a job I’d never done before, but my Uncle Fitz assured me I’d be great at it, given my literary knowledge and acumen for acquiring and retaining information. He would know. Uncle Fitz owned an amazing, rare book shop in Charlottesville, and as such, he had been collecting books from all over the world for most of his seventy-five years.
“Girl, you are made for this work. It’s in your DNA. I’m certain,” he told me when he found out I was leaving teaching and looking for a new career. “I’m long past my traveling days, but with my experience and your knowledge of books, I think we can do quite nicely.”
I had stared at him a little dumbfounded when he told me the salary he’d pay, a salary that outpaced my teaching one by a third, and when he added that he’d give me a commission for my finds as well, I almost refused, saying it was too generous. But then I took a deep breath, sat back into my worth like my therapist always said I should, and agreed.
“Now, we just need to pick your specialty. Let’s see, I have buyers in contemporary fiction and the classics, and your friend Beattie has been indispensable in the eighteenth and nineteenth-century European texts.” He pushed a hand through his bushy gray hair. “How would you feel about finding folklore and fairy-tale texts?”
How would I feel about it? I’d be overjoyed. I had studied those subjects in my PhD program, as Uncle Fitz well knew, and while I hadn’t ever been hired to teach in those areas, they were still my passion. I just loved reading the stories that helped people from earlier times understand their lived experiences. Those tales helped me understand my experiences, too, even if I had yet to meet a dragon or a selkie.
I looked at my uncle and rolled my eyes. “I guess I could handle that, Uncle Fitz.” Then, I reached out and startled him with a huge hug. We weren’t really the most physically demonstrative of families, but sometimes, the gifts in life required bone-crushing hugs. This was one of those times.
“Excellent, dear. Now, Beattie is already scheduled to go to Edinburgh for a bit of scouting about Stevenson’s first editions. Perhaps you’d like to join her?” He pulled a folder out of a tipping stack at the edge of his desk. “I got word of a rare collection of Scottish sea monster tales and thought that might be a good place to start.” He handed me a photograph of a beautiful, leather-bound volume that featured a snake-like creature pressed into the front cover.
I stared at the blue leather and the fine work that was embossed on it, and I nodded, unable to speak with my excitement. “When do we leave?”
My uncle grinned. “Friday. Beattie has all the information. She’ll be your guide for our processes. I suppose you won’t mind that.” He winked at me.
Beattie Andrews was my best friend. Had been my best friend since second grade when she had walked up to me and said, “You look weird. I’m weird, too. Want to play dress-up?”
It was a meeting of kindred souls from that day on. When Beattie had come out and begun her transition from male to female, we had stayed close even as a lot of our friends fell away because they just didn’t know what to say or do . . . or because they were simply hateful. Through all the challenges she faced, Beattie was always there for me through my break-ups and two divorces, and now I was going to get to work with her. I was excited about the book collecting piece, but more, I was just excited to spend more time with Beattie.
And our first stop was Edinburgh, my favorite city (so far) in the world. I’d visited twice, once in college when the boy I loved and I sat on Arthur’s Seat and surveyed the city below, and once after my mom died and a friend invited me over to enjoy the country with her and her family. On both trips, I’d tried to take in as much of the Old City as I could, but I knew I’d missed so much. And now, I could see all of it with Beattie. Suddenly, forty-eight hours seemed like a long time to wait.
The days had flown by with packing and prepping our contacts, a process Beattie had shepherded me through with humor and style, and here I was, donning my new but vintage outfit for a plane ride. I knew Beattie would get a kick out of my stylings, especially since she always looked effortlessly stylish in her standard black leggings and tunics that highlighted her willowy shape and long silver hair. She was not one to put on airs, but today felt like an air-worthy day to me, and I was going with it.
When I stepped out of my apartment building, Beattie was at the curb next to her white Subaru wagon. “Look at you,” she said. Without hesitation, she removed the hat from my head and tossed it into the hatch of the car before moving out of the way so I could put my small suitcase inside. She smiled at me broadly. “You know you’re just going to lose that before we get on the plane.”
I sighed. “Too much, huh?” I ran my fingers through my thick curly hair. “It’s probably for the best. This mess is going up into a bun as soon as we’re seated.” I loved wearing my hair down since I’d finally grown to love its massive volume, but it was hot and hard to see through, so it was usually up on top of my head as soon as it dried. Sometimes before.
“Not too much for our work, no. But yes, too much for the plane. And you can’t pack that thing.” She climbed into the driver’s seat. “Love the jacket, though.”
I let a small smile pass my lips as I sat down beside her and put on my seat belt. “Me, too.” I looked over at her, and as usual, she looked amazing, even in today’s slight wardrobe deviation of yoga pants and a T-shirt knotted at her waist. Her makeup was flawless, and somehow, her silver hair never had that yellow tinge that seemed to affect other women’s gray. “You wearing new blush?”
Her pale skin flushed as she pulled out onto Preston Avenue and started heading north of town toward the airport. “Do you like it?”
I nodded. “It gives you good color.”
“I like it, too, and since it’s that cream stuff, it feels moisturizing, too.” She patted her cheeks. “Never enough moisturizer for my skin, you know?”
I did know. In this way, we were about as different as could be. My skin went oily, and while I needed to moisturize as much as the next woman, I needed to keep things light to avoid breakouts. Beattie, however, seemed like she could lather on motor oil and never get a single pimple.
As we drove across town, I quizzed Beattie on what we were going to do (besides work) in Edinburgh. She had insisted on planning our itinerary, both bookish and tourist-ish, and she wanted it to be a surprise. I loved surprises, but I was also a person who liked to look up every detail of a new place before I visited. Beattie’s closed lips meant I’d had to wing it in my online reading. I knew a lot about Greyfriars Bobby since I’d watched the movie and read the true story of the loyal little dog. I was sure Beattie would take us there since she knew I was a sucker for a good story, but beyond that, I was at a loss.
My friend, however, was not spilling even a tidbit of our plans. She just kept saying, “I’ll see.”
“You hear her, Butterball,” I said to the plump hamster tucked into his bespoke travel bag that Uncle Fitz had insisted on buying me as a “first adventure” gift. He knew I wouldn’t be leaving my fuzzy pet at home, even if I found the best pet sitter in the world, especially since airlines didn’t mind pets traveling as long as they had their paperwork.
BB was fully up to speed on his shots, had a microchip in case he wandered off, and was cleared for EU travel with a small passport-like document that I’d been able to procure online. BB had come to me sort of by happenstance when my neighbor’s young daughter, Tilly, had decided the little guy would be happier outside in the wild. Fortunately, I’d been there to watch his first venture into the grass behind our building, and I’d kept a close eye on him until she went inside. Then, I’d scooped him up and taken him in with me, where I’d quickly spoiled him with all the best in hamster accommodations, including a rhinestone-encrusted running wheel that he refused to touch out of what, I am certain, was a desire to keep his round form in its most languid shape.
He did get regular exercise, though, because about once a week, I let him run around on Tilly’s back porch while I kept an eye out for cats and hawks so that she could see he was happy and thriving in his new “wild” home.
Last night, when BB had made his trek to her deck, I’d let Tilly know that he had told me he was taking a vacation. She had clapped her hands and decided he must be going to a beach somewhere because, of course, that was her favorite vacation spot, a fact I simply didn’t understand since I loathed the beach, especially in summer. Still, Tilly seemed satisfied with our tale of travel for the little rodent, and now, he was snoozing, belly up in his bag on my lap, clearly determined to ignore my attempt at conversation with him.
After I had tried to coax a peeved reaction from my pet and had been given only tiny snores, Beattie finally relented and said, “Okay, I’ll tell you one thing. We are having afternoon tea at Edinburgh Castle tomorrow afternoon.”
I squealed in delight, startling BB to an upright position, from which he stared at me with the kind of scorn only a hamster can muster. I didn’t care. Afternoon tea in a castle. I couldn’t wait.
The flight was pretty mundane except for the excellent coffee and the three small children who, despite BB’s best imitation of a corpse, somehow figured out he was on the plane and made visits every half-hour or so to say hello. For his part, my pet acted the put-out diva quite well, but I could tell, as only I could, that he was secretly pleased with his new fan club. His tiny tail was puffed up quite a bit by the time we landed.
The children had been a delight, but as we got our bags and found a taxi to take us to the B&B Beattie had raved about on the flight, I felt myself growing fatigued. I hadn’t ever really been one for all-nighters, and now, at forty-seven, my body was definitely in opposition to them. And I knew that adjusting to the time difference after our overnight flight would be best achieved by staying awake all day.
Still, we had tea at the castle to look forward to, and if I knew Beattie, and I definitely knew Beattie, we’d be starting work right away. Fortunately, my best friend also had a hearty appetite, so she had pre-arranged a full English breakfast—I made a mental note to ask if there was such thing as a Scottish equivalent—upon our arrival at the B&B. Never had I been so glad to see a sausage—a banger, I was corrected by my companion—as I was at that moment. The coffee on the plane had been wonderful. The rest of the food was sadly typical for air travel.
Breakfast in our tummies, our bags in our rooms, and our hostess cooing over Butterball in the front parlor, we set off to our first meeting of the day. As we walked toward the center of town and the National Library of Scotland, Beattie finally deemed me ready to hear our work itinerary. Apparently, our vacation one was still top secret, to my continued annoyance.
“The foremost expert in Scottish folklore is meeting us today at 1:30. He has some insights about the book we’re looking to procure from our meeting on Monday.” She looked at me out of the corner of her eye. “Plus, he is single, as best I can tell, and quite your type.” I tried not to look a little pleased, but given that my best friend knew just how abominable my dating experience had been in the past three years, I knew she wouldn’t buy it if I tried to play it totally cool about an attractive, bookish man.
“Oh yeah?” I said with a strained attempt at casualness. “He’s not your type?”
“Nope, not a beard or tattoo in sight.” She grimaced. “Too uptight and brainy for me. So that means just perfect for you.”
I could have argued, but she wasn’t wrong. “So he knows about the Sea Monster Chronicles, then.” I had spent a fair bit of my time in the past two days looking up the various sea monster tales of Scotland and had been delighted to learn that they were thought to be a kind of dragon by some. Even old Nessie had some stories that linked her to fire breath. The laws of nature caused me to struggle with the idea of underwater animals breathing fire, but then again, I didn’t understand how fish glowed in the dark, either, so I couldn’t question much.
Beattie nodded. “He’s done a fair amount of study about the lore, and while he has moved far past the point of believing in such animals, he does know a great deal about the people who created the legends. He told Fitz that this was the most extensive collection of medieval tales he’d ever come across and even hinted that he hoped the National Library might buy it.”
I winced. “Oh no.” I was suddenly even more nervous. “I don’t want to be poaching national treasures from anyone, least of all a hot librarian.”
Beattie shook her head. “Fitz made it clear that we were procuring the book for a Scottish patron who wanted to donate the book to the Library in honor of his father, a well-regarded Scottish paleontologist.”
I sighed. “So the Library will get the book but not have to buy it.”
“Exactly,” Beattie said with a grin. “Your uncle is famous in this industry for a reason.”
She wasn’t wrong. Uncle Fitz got commissions to find books all over the world, mostly for wealthy book collectors who wanted to add to their private libraries. But he was very discriminating in his choice of clients, so I should have known he would never be involved in anything that would be regarded as foul play by anyone in the business.
Uncle Fitz had two rules:
1.Books belong, when possible, to the public in some form.
2.Books should stay in their home country as much as possible.
I knew he occasionally broke these rules when necessary, say when a book was in danger of being destroyed or lost and the only safe home he could find for it was in a country not of its origin. But by and large, he was devoutly faithful to his policies. It was one reason I was eager to work with him.
As we approached the Library, I squashed the little bit of disappointment I felt at seeing the building. I’d been hoping for Scottish architecture with spires and arches, but instead, the building looked remarkably like the classic Greek architecture on which buildings in our own nation’s capital had been fashioned. All clean lines and bare sandstone.
When we went inside, however, all my disappointment faded away as I looked at the illuminated manuscripts displayed in glass cases in the lobby. Each swirl and icon on the pages was hand-drawn, and I could have stayed to try to decipher the text all day.
But fortunately, or unfortunately, as the case may be, my fascination with the manuscripts before me was interrupted when a very handsome, delightfully nerdy man in tweed and horn-rimmed glasses asked if I was Poe Baxter.
I stammered for a minute as I looked at him, and Beattie had to answer for me. “Yes, this Poe. I’m Beattie. Thank you for seeing us, Mr. Anderson.”
“Adaire, please. Nice to meet you both,” Adaire said in an accent that was definitely Scottish but also not quite the brogue I expected from my extensive experience with Scottish dialect derived exclusively from watching Outlander.
I finally put out my hand to shake his and pulled my face into a smile that I hoped seemed friendly and not like a creepy American stalker person. “Yes, thank you for seeing us.”
“Are you a scholar of illuminated manuscripts as well as folklore, Ms. Baxter?” he asked as he pointed at the glass case I had been staring at.
I blushed. He had called me a scholar, a title I was never afforded as a community college professor, I was flattered but shook my head. “Far from it. I find the art to be fascinating, though, and the little I know about the practice of creating the illuminations is intriguing, too. Although I’ll admit, I learned most of that from Umberto Eco.”
“Ah, The Name of the Rose,” he said with a smile. “An excellent mystery.” He blushed a little when he met my gaze. “Would you like more time here?” He glanced from me to Beattie.
I shook my head as I looked at my best friend, who had a knowing grin on her face that made me kind of want to punch her in the arm. “We can always come back. We want to respect your time.” I smiled at him. “Plus, I’m so eager to see what you have to share.”
He nodded, and Beattie and I trailed behind him as he took us to the back of the lobby and led us through an arched, wooden door. I was a sucker for a secret passageway, and this entrance very much felt like it could be one.
Unfortunately, that illusion dissolved a bit when the doorway opened onto a very typical corridor with doors on each side. What wasn’t typical, however, was that the walls were covered in famous paintings, including a study for Da Vinci’s Virgin of the Rocks, one of my favorite paintings of all time. Without thinking, I stopped cold and stared at the woman’s face and felt tears prick the back of my eyes.
Beattie stepped beside me and smiled. “She looks so wise and a bit tired.”
I sighed. “Yes, it’s why I love the final painting. Da Vinci seemed to understand the weariness that comes from motherhood, even for the Virgin Mary.”
Adaire turned back to us. “We hang some of the pieces that the National Gallery can’t display.” He gestured around the walls. “Everything is climate-controlled here, so it’s a good place for them. Plus, at least some people get to enjoy them instead of them living in storage for years at a time.”
“It is a sort of aesthetic tragedy that so much great art sits in back rooms,” Beattie said as we began to walk again. “Maybe we could take over a few superstores and turn them into museums.”
That was a good idea, in my opinion, but I didn’t have much time to think about it because Adaire led us through another door on the right side of the hall. The allure of magic was around us again as we stepped into the wood-walled office. The walls were lined with bookshelves full of titles, and the large wooden desk was clear and polished, with just a laptop on it. The space seemed the opposite of my uncle’s store, but somehow, it felt just as vibrant, just as full of stories and their people.
As he took a seat behind his desk, he pointed to two wing-backed chairs in front of him, and Beattie and I sat down. The chairs were immensely comfortable, and I felt even more at home in this space as I noticed a small toy rabbit on the corner of a shelf behind Adaire’s head. A man who could display a stuffed animal amongst all this heady, bookish stuff was my kind of man. I blushed at my own thoughts.
“Well, let’s begin here,” Adaire said as he pulled a slim folder from the shelf behind him. “This is the provenance, as best we can tell, for the book you are hoping to acquire.” He spun the folder in my direction and slid it across the desk to me.
I leaned forward, opened the file, and stared at the image of the book at the top of the page. Definitely the same book. As I began to read, I found my pulse quickening. Apparently, the book had been handmade in Inverness in 1340 by a man named Angus Duncan. Duncan operated a small book bindery that supplied tomes to the clan chiefs of Scotland. Each book was one of a kind, the paper in front of me said, and each was immensely valuable because of its age and craftsmanship.
“The book contains all the seanchas about water monsters known at the time,” I read. “Seanchas?” I asked Adaire. “Related to séances?”
“In a way, maybe,” he said with a smile. “It’s the Gaelic word for lore. I’ve always wondered how the term relates to the word science myself.”
Beattie cleared her throat next to me, her not-so-secret way of signaling to me that we were about to go far off track. She knew that I could deep dive into etymology quite quickly if allowed. I glanced over at her and nodded, then flipped the page.
There, I saw a long list of names, beginning with Angus Duncan and moving through a whole slew of men up until 2019. The name listed there was Seamus Stovall, the man who currently owned the book. My uncle had told me a bit about Stovall, and while he sounded intriguing, he also sounded like a lot of wealthy white guys—very convinced that he had earned everything he had and, thus, required to be paid top dollar for it.
Still, my uncle and I shared the same biases about the world, so I thought it wise to get Adaire’s perspective on the current owner. “Tell me what you know about Stovall?”
Adaire rolled his eyes. “The word eccentric was probably coined for him. He has one of those mustaches that he waxes into curls at the end and then plays with as if they’re his embodied talisman of good fortune.”
“Wow. That’s a wonderful description,” Beattie said. “So he has a, uh, a strong sense of his self-worth?”
“That is kindly put,” Adaire said with a smile. “He is incredibly wealthy, and while he is also very generous with the small village he lives in, he’s a shrewd businessman. He knows the monetary worth of this book, and he will expect to be paid what he sees as his due.”
I squinted at Adaire. “Your choice of words seems very deliberate there. ‘What he sees as his due?’”
Adaire raised his eyebrows. “Caught that, did you? Well, as I see it, this book is a national treasure, one that no one person can really own. But Stovall and I disagree on this point.” He sighed. “It’s one reason I was not able to acquire the book directly for the Library.”
I nodded. “Well, I assure you our patron believes much as you do, and I look forward to returning the book to the public when we come back from the Highlands.” I tried to sound confident, but for my first buying experience, it was beginning to feel a bit beyond my depth. “Is there anything further you’d like to be sure we know about the book?”
Here, Adaire leaned forward and raised one eyebrow. “Now that you ask, there is a legend about the book itself.”
If my attention hadn’t already been captured for a number of reasons by this conversation, this sentence would have brought me in completely. As it was, I mirrored Adaire’s body language and leaned toward the desk. “A legend, you say?”
“A curse, really,” Adaire spoke more softly. “The stories have it that the person who has possession of the book begins to see monsters in every body of water.”
“Oh,” I said as I imagined how I would feel if I saw a sea monster in every lake. I decided I might be more fascinated than anything, so I wasn’t sure this story could actually be characterized as a curse. “Well, that would be disconcerting,” I said, trying to be tactful, “but seeing monsters is something some of us might enjoy.”
A glint of something between mirth and fear flashed through Adaire’s eyes. “Agreed, if we were talking about monsters in only the lochs and oceans, but rumor has it that every man who has owned this book sees monsters in every body of water he encounters.” He laid hard emphasis on the word every.
“Like in his bathtub?” Beattie said quietly.
“And watering trough and pitcher and sometimes every mirror as well.” Adaire’s voice had grown somber.
I let out a long breath. “That’s intense then and maybe maddening in the very literal sense of the word.” Seeing Nessie in the Loch was one thing. A monster in every reflective surface was another. “How does Stovall feel about this legend?”
“Now, I’m not implying anything at all about how you should go about your negotiations, you hear.” He looked at Beattie and me with a firm gaze. “I’m just sharing what I’ve heard as potential background information. I have no part in how you acquire this manuscript.”
I looked at Beattie, and we both looked back at Adaire and nodded. Message received, I thought.
He continued. “From what I’ve heard, Stovall has required his staff to cover all mirrors, has forbidden all standing water on his property, and makes his assistant do all internet work for him so that he doesn’t even inadvertently see images of water on the screen.” Adaire sat back and studied the two of us across from him. “From what I can gather, the previous owner’s family became so concerned with his talk of monsters that they had him committed to a hospital for mental health treatment.”
I stared at this man who had seemed, until this moment, quite reasonable and studied. “I want to be sure I’m understanding. You’re saying this”—I looked back at the list of names in front of me—“Davis MacDonald was diagnosed with a major condition that was directly caused by this book.”
Adaire shook his head and smiled. “Not exactly. I’m not saying that’s why he was diagnosed or even that he was diagnosed with anything. What I am saying is that he claimed to be seeing monsters everywhere, and that led his niece to send him for treatment.”
I whistled. “Alrighty then.”
“So”—Beattie turned to me—“what I’m thinking is that we need to talk to MacDonald’s niece to figure out exactly what they think happened with their dad. And then we can use that as leverage to help with our conversations with Mr. Stovall.”
I nodded. “I think that is an excellent idea, Beattie. I’m glad you came up with it.” I looked over at Adaire and winked. Then, we both blushed.
After exchanging numbers and making plans to follow up with Adaire after our trip to the Highlands, Beattie and I headed up to the castle for high tea. On the way there, I studied the beautiful old storefronts and tall houses along the road.
One particularly gorgeous building that was a pink stucco that would have been garish anywhere but in this stony, gray city caught my eye. As we strolled past, I studied the beautiful wooden door and then glanced up at the lintel. There, carved in stone, was a sea monster looking directly at me.