I approached the building beyond the stable, thinking it would be a house, but when I reached it, I saw it was an odd shape for a house, one long rectangle, emitting a steady rumble that reminded me of the bees. When I knocked on the door, it opened right away. I realized it hadn’t been latched. Inside was a single enormous room full of tables and wooden benches. Seated around the tables were people with books splayed before them. More books lined the walls, on shelves that climbed to the ceiling. There were ladders for reaching books up high, and wagon-wheel chandeliers that hung down low over the tables. The people were men and women, young and old, and they seemed to be all speaking at once—that was the rumble—carrying on murmuring conversations. Some of them were not so murmuring, were in fact robust. Some seemed disputatious.
“Have you come to study?” someone asked. A young man, tall and lean, with a sparse beard the color of marmalade. He might have been the Captain’s younger brother. He might have been the Captain at an earlier moment in time.
“Study?” There was a tiredness in my body, a soreness I could no longer push away. I felt myself sway.
“Or”—his eyes moving over what must surely have been my general dirtiness—“are you just looking for a place to rest?”
The kitten sneezed and we both looked down. She lay partly covered by straw. Her eyes were gummy and her ribs rose and fell with effort.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with her,” I said.
I let him guide me away from the people, cutting a path around the edge of the room toward an empty area in the back. I thought it was because we were bedraggled and didn’t belong, but then I realized he was leading us to the fireplace, a great big one with a good fire going in it, and there he ushered us into a large plush chair. He slipped the rucksack off my back as I sank down, and the sweetness of being able to recline canceled out any protest I might have made at his taking the provisions away. The chair was soft and the burning logs looked soft as well: coated with char and fluttering skins of ash. They looked as if they had been burning for a long time. My whole life.
“Wait here,” said the young man, leaving.
I almost laughed. It seemed to me I’d been waiting forever. Waiting to get where I was meant to go, waiting to know what I was meant to find. The only thing that kept me from laughing was exhaustion.
And the kitten, who lay too light upon my lap.
Don’t you go, I thought. Don’t you leave me, too.