‘Thank you, Professor,’ River said, resisting the urge to punch the air again. ‘You won’t regret it.’
He sighed again. ‘Let’s hope not. Now, before you rush off to make-up, perhaps you could cast your eyes over this.’ He held out the jawbone to her in what she recognised as a gesture of reconciliation. ‘I find myself somewhat puzzled by the nature of the wear on these molars.’
* * *
Her own work beyond her, Jane Gresham was attempting to bring her mind to bear on the undergraduate seminar she was supposed to be conducting the following week on the role of the pathetic fallacy in Romantic poetry. So devoid of inspiration had she been that she’d resorted to dredging the bound volumes of the Proceedings of the Modern Language Association for anything that might remotely help shape her session. She was engrossed in a particularly dull article about Coleridge’s early work when Dan’s head appeared over the top of her library carrel.
‘Thought I’d find you here,’ he said, sounding faintly smug.
‘It’s hardly rocket science,’ Jane said repressively. ‘Considering I always sit in the same carrel.’
He came round the side of the partition and pulled a face when he saw what she was doing. ‘My God. If PMLA comes, can despair be far behind?’
Jane pushed the book away. ‘It’s already here.’
‘So let me take you away from all of this and buy you a coffee.’
‘I shouldn’t, really. I need to prepare this seminar.’
Dan raised his eyebrows and pulled down the corners of his mouth. ‘Trust me, you’ll feel better about it after a swift injection of caffeine and half an hour in my company.’
Having put up the pretence of a fight, Jane stood up and pocketed her pen. ‘I’m leaving my notes here,’ she said, warning him that there were limits to the extent of her willingness to be distracted.
Without further negotiation they walked out of the building and round the corner to the Bear and Staff. The pub served decent coffee and, unlike the student refectory, still allowed smokers to indulge their vice. Jane perked up as soon as Dan returned to their corner booth with two large mochas topped with a pyramid of whipped cream. ‘You are such a bad man,’ she teased.
‘I don’t believe in half measures.’
‘I don’t know how you stay so slim,’ Jane complained, eyeing the washboard stomach beneath the white T-shirt.
‘Lots of exercise, darling. And cigarettes. They kill the appetite, you know.’
‘Not to mention those of us who have to put up with your smoke.’ Jane took an appreciative sip of her drink, savouring the contrast between the cool cream and the hot brew beneath. ‘Mmm. Just the ticket. So, Dan, why am I here?’
He feigned an expression of innocence. ‘Jane, I’m surprised at you. It’s not like I’ve never invited you out for coffee before.’
Jane rolled her eyes. ‘You’ve never gone to the trouble of tracking me down in the library and hauling me off to the pub before. I’ve got work to get back to, so don’t make me drag it out of you.’ With a shrug he spread his hands in a gesture she recognised. Small boy playing the cute innocent card, she thought. You’re getting too old for that one, Danny Boy.
‘What can I say? You nailed me, babe. Yes, I do have an ulterior motive.’
‘Well, you better tell me what it is, because I don’t have time to play twenty questions. Spill.’
Dan smoothed his eyebrow in a gesture she found familiar from watching him in seminar groups. It was his way of buying time. ‘What we were talking about the other day–Christian and Wordsworth? It’s been kind of bugging me,’ he said.
‘Bugging you how?’
‘We’ve been friends for a long time now, Jane. I think I know you pretty well.’ He nodded to himself for emphasis. ‘I don’t think I realised until the other day how much weight you place on the Fletcher Christian story. And I’d say, of all the people I work with, you are the least likely to be taken in by a baseless rumour.’
Jane felt a sudden tension in her neck. ‘Very flattering, Dan. But we’ve all got our blind spots. Arthur Conan Doyle believed in fairies. Hugh Trevor-Roper believed in the Hitler Diaries. I believe in Wordsworth’s lost epic. It’s really not worth losing sleep over.’
‘Good try, Jane, but no cigar. I don’t believe you. I think there’s more to this than you told me. And I want to help you.’
Jane stared into her cup. She’d held this secret to herself for so long, there had been times when she had wondered if she had dreamed it. She’d told no one, not even Jake, in spite of the fact that she loved him and, if anyone could authenticate what she’d seen, he was the one. Or at least, he would know someone who could. And having denied it to Jake, how could she offer it to Dan? Though it was hard to deny that he might be helpful to her. His own postgraduate work on the linguistic congruences among the Lakeland Romantics could well help to verify anything she found as being typically Wordsworthian in its use of words and grammatical structures. Still, her reluctance held out. ‘Please, Dan. Take my word for it.’
‘Jane, look at me,’ he said, his voice concerned and serious. She lifted her head. ‘Dreams are for chasing. How are you going to feel if there is something to be found and somebody else finds it?’
The question she had asked herself so many times. She pushed her curls back from her face and made a decision. ‘How well do you know the Dove Cottage archive?’
Dan looked surprised. Whatever he’d been expecting, she thought, that hadn’t been it. ‘I’ve done some research there, when I was doing the linguistic comparisons between De Quincey’s early work and Wordsworth’s prose. It’s a vast archive. More than fifty thousand items, or something like that.’
‘So many that it’s never really been definitively catalogued. Anyway, they’re about to open a new library and study centre, so a lot of the material has been boxed up waiting for the move. More or less inaccessible to anyone needing to study it.’ Jane paused, shaking off the last traces of doubt.
‘So,’ she continued, ‘I wanted to look over some family letters and, typically, what I needed was packed away. But I’ve known Anthony Catto, the centre director, since I was at school. I worked there a couple of summers when I was an undergraduate. So I persuaded Anthony to let me go foraging. And in among all the stuff that I expected to find, I came across something that I’d never seen referred to anywhere in the literature.’
‘Dramatic pause,’ Dan said drily. ‘Come on, Jane, you’re killing me here.’
‘It had been tucked into the wrong envelope, along with the letter that should have been there. I don’t expect anyone had even noticed it. The letter it was with is of no particular significance, you see. It probably hadn’t been touched for years.’
‘Jane,’ Dan said loudly.
She closed her eyes for a moment, summoning the image from her memory. ‘It was a letter from Mary Wordsworth to one of her sons. John, I presume, since she refers to children but not a wife and John was a widower. “My beloved son, I trust you and the children are in good health. I have found this day troubling matter in your father’s hand. It may surprise you that, in spite of the close confidence between us, I was in ignorance of this while he lived, and wish heartily I had remained in that state. You will easily see the need for secrecy while your father lived, and he left me no instructions concerning its disposition. Since it closely touches you, and may be the occasion of more pain, I wish to leave to you the decision as to what should be done. I will convey the matter to you by a faithful hand. You must do as you see fit.”’ Jane opened her eyes and looked seriously at Dan. ‘You see what that could mean?’
Dan frowned. ‘It could mean almost anything, Jane,’