Lauren Willig Read Free Page B

folding chairs with hard plastic seats. Padding might have encouraged people to linger. At the far end of the room, a small counter, not unlike those in drugstores, separated the reference room from the archives beyond. Through the gap I caught a tantalizing glimpse of utilitarian metal shelves piled with a variety of acid-free boxes and big black binders.
     
     
At the desk, a man in a hot pink T-shirt guarded the gap. I use the word “guarded” loosely. He was so deeply absorbed in whatever he was reading that I could have vaulted over the desk without his noticing me. The thought was tempting, but that kindergarten training dies hard. I didn’t vault. Instead I coughed. When that didn’t work, I coughed again. Loudly. I was afraid I was going to have to resort to more drastic measures—like sneezing—but the third cough finally broke through his literary absorption. As he hoisted himself up, I took a peek at his reading material. It was a copy of Hello! magazine, open to a fine showing of airbrushed celebrities.
     
     
Somehow, I didn’t think this was the archivist. In fact, I had a pretty shrewd guess as to who he was.
     
     
“I believe we spoke on the phone,” I said.
     
     
Clearly, he also remembered our conversation fondly. His face went from lascivious to hostile in the space of a second. “Oh. You.”
     
     
So much for being a goodwill ambassador for America, or whatever else it is that the Fulbright people expect you to do. Fortunately, my grant was a Clive fellowship, not a Fulbright, so I was off the hook. As far as I could tell, Mr. Clive had harbored no pretensions about his grantees fostering international amity.
     
     
That being the case, I felt no guilt at all about saying crisply, “I’m here to see the papers of Sebastian, Lord Vaughn.”
     
     
The boy gave me a look as though to say, “You would.” Levering himself up with obvious effort, he trudged wearily off into the blazing desert sands, five hundred miles across rugged terrain, to the metal shelves right behind the desk. There, he made a great show of studying the labels on the binders.
     
     
“That’s Vaughn, v-a-u-g-h-n,” I said helpfully. “Sebastian, Lord Vaughn.”
     
     
“Which one?” asked Pink Shirt dourly.
     
     
It had never occurred to me that there might be other Sebastian, Lord Vaughns floating around. “There’s more than one?”
     
     
“1768 or 1903?”
     
     
It was a bit like ordering a hamburger. “1768.”
     
     
After a moment, his head popped back around again. “Do you want the 1790 box, the 1800 box, or”—his head ducked back down for a moment—”the everything else box?”
     
     
Next, he was going to ask me if I wanted fries with that. I made my choice, and the 1800 box was duly shoved into my hands. The tape on one end bore a label that descriptively stated, “Seb’n, Ld. Vn., Misc. Docs. 1800–1810.”
     
     
I began to wonder if the archivist actually existed, or if they just pretended they had one for the sake of show. Not only was that one of the less convincing classificatory systems I had ever encountered, there had been no effort made to put the contents of the box in any sort of order; small notebooks, loose papers, and packets of letters were all jumbled, one on top of the other. Given that Vaughn had lived well into the reign of Victoria, my hunch was that the everything else box wasn’t so-called because there wasn’t much there for the next forty years of his life, but simply because no one had gotten around to sorting through it yet.
     
     
Settling myself down at the more stable of the two tables, I reached for the first packet in the 1800 box, gingerly unwinding the string that bound the letters. There’s nothing like peering into someone else’s correspondence. You never know what you might find. Coded messages, plotting skullduggery, passionate letters from a foreign amour, invitations to a late assignation…These turned out to fit none of the