table and staring at the empty desk in the corner of the room. “He didn’t send them to me.” He nodded toward the desk. “He sent them to her.”
Carwyn’s eyes widened as he turned to stare at the girl’s desk and heard Giovanni murmur, “He sent them to Beatrice.”
Chapter Ten
He had gone to prison for love.
She couldn’t tear her eyes away from the translation of the second letter of Angelo Poliziano to Giovanni Pico as she huddled in the stacks, avoiding the packed reading room on Wednesday afternoon. Pico had been imprisoned for his affair with a married woman and only escaped because of his connection to Lorenzo de Medici.
He had gone to stay with Signore Niccolo Andros in Perugia, presumably to study Andros’s library of mystic texts and recover from his imprisonment.
She read it twice, adding to her notes on the first which she then tucked carefully in her bag. Though both letters had been under the intense scrutiny Dr. Christiansen had predicted throughout the day, she had managed early in her shift to get her hands on them for a few minutes to make a copy of the notes. There was little doubt in her mind that Giovanni and Carwyn knew exactly who the letters had come from. She scratched down a reminder to herself to tell them that Dr. Christiansen mentioned more letters would be arriving.
“B?” Charlotte called. She shoved her copy of the translation and her notes into her messenger bag and stood up, pretending to examine a stack of photographs that needed to be catalogued.
“Hey, I know you’re as sick of the philosophers as I am,” Charlotte sighed, “but could you come take care of the reading room for a bit?”
“Sure.”
“I know you’re going to be here all night, but if I don’t get a break from the chatter, I’m going to end up throwing old reference books at them.”
Beatrice smiled and held in a laugh. The reading room was unusually packed that afternoon, as the philosophy department took a look at the documents. The history department had already come and gone for the day, and the Italian studies department was due that evening. Apparently they had all worked out some tentative custody agreement for the Pico letters.
“Are they scheduled to stay through the evening hours?” she asked, conscious of the two guests she had no doubt would be showing up when it was dark enough.
Charlotte nodded. “Yeah, I guess philosophy’s leaving at five, and then the Italian chair is showing up to take a look at them. Have you met Dr. Scalia?”
She shook her head.
“He’s a hoot. He’s got these enormous glasses and looks like an owl, but he’s sweet man and not too chatty. He’ll be here most of the evening, so between him and Dr. Handsome, you should have a pretty quiet room.”
Beatrice sighed, wondering whether poor Dr. Scalia was going to shake hands with Dr. Vecchio and forget about the letters he was supposed to be examining. She had a feeling Giovanni would be more than happy if the Italian professor suddenly remembered he needed to pick up his dry-cleaning. She might have to lay some ground rules about playing with cerebral cortexes while in the library.
Reminding herself that Carwyn would also be in attendance, she decided there would definitely need to be ground rules.
Every now and then, she had wondered why she had so easily accepted her strange new reality. The more she thought about it, the more Beatrice decided that the idea of vampires just didn’t seem that far-fetched.
She could accept there were things in the world that science didn’t understand yet, and who was to say that some of those things didn’t have fangs and need to survive by drinking human blood?
As she sat at the reference desk, listening to philosophers quietly argue the meaning of this, or the implication of that, she thought about how much had changed since Giovanni had lived as a human. If Dr. Giovanni Vecchio was, indeed, the Italian count the letters were addressed to, that meant that he was 540 years old, and even at age twenty-three had been considered one of the most progressive humanist philosophers of the Renaissance.
He hadn’t answered her questions, but it was too coincidental that the two mysterious letters had been donated by a vampire to the very library where Giovanni had chosen to do his research and she worked. They had to be connected.
Not long after six o’clock, a small man with a shock of silver-grey hair walked through the double doors.
“Dr. Scalia?” she asked of the man, who did remind her of an owl with his large round glasses and tiny nose.
He smiled eagerly. “Yes, yes! And you are?”
“I’m Beatrice De Novo. It’s a pleasure to meet you. You have an appointment for the Pico letters, is that correct?”
“Yes, thank you.”
As she listened to another academic wax eloquent on the importance of the two Italian letters, Giovanni and Carwyn silently entered the reading room. She quickly settled Dr. Scalia at the table with the Pico letters and walked over to the two vampires.
“Okay,” she whispered in her sternest librarian voice, “he’s a sweet, old man, and I don’t want you two to mess with his brain. He’s a professor. He needs it.”
Giovanni frowned. “Really, Beatrice, how clumsy do you think we are? He would never realize-”
“Don’t care. It’s
She saw Giovanni’s nostrils flair a little in annoyance, or maybe he had simply caught the scent of the old parchment at the other table. Carwyn, she thought, looked like he might break into laughter at any minute and kept glancing between his friend and Beatrice.
“Fine. If I could have the Tibetan manuscript then, Miss De Novo.”
She rolled her eyes at his tone, but turned and walked back to the stacks to get the manuscript for him as he chose a table near the small professor who was already busy taking notes.
By the time she got back, she noticed that Giovanni had assumed his usual position at the table, though he was watching Dr. Scalia with an almost predatory stare. She set the book down in front of him and grabbed a pencil and a piece of paper from the stack he had sitting on the table. With a quick scribble and a fold, she wrote a small note and propped it in front of the 500 year old vampire.
He couldn’t keep the smirk from sneaking across his face. He looked up at her, winked, and bent his head to his notes.
Wearing her own smile, she walked back to the reference desk to find Carwyn had pulled a chair over and was reading the paperback she had started that morning. As always, he was eye-catching in a loud Hawaiian shirt that clashed with his red hair and made his blue eyes seem to pop out.
He glanced up from the book. “Do you-”
