The Book of Illumination by Mary Ann Winkowski Page B

nobody’s ever been caught.
    “What would this guy do?” Sylvia asked.
    “I’m not sure. Maybe he’d put the word out that he’d been contacted by somebody, a person who knew that the manuscript had been stolen and would pay a lot of money to get it. But I’m just guessing. Dec didn’t get into that.”
    Suddenly Sylvia’s expression brightened and she half stood up. She was blocked in by the table, though, so she quickly sat back down. A man I took to be Sam was approaching us, and he seemed to have brought a friend.
    “Good morning,” Sam said cheerfully.
    It was afternoon, but never mind.
    “You’re looking lovely, as usual,” he went on, kissing Sylvia on the cheek. “
This,”
he said, emphasizing the word in a way that held a meaning I didn’t understand, “is Julian Rowan.”
    “Nice to meet you,” I said.
    “Pleasure,” he responded.
    “Sylvia Cremaldi,” Sylvia said, extending her hand. “And this is my friend Anza O’Malley. She’s … doing some work with me at the Athenaeum.”
    The name
Julian Rowan
sounded familiar, but I couldn’t recall from where. He was tall and about my age, with hair the color of wet hay and paws big enough to palm a basketball, and he was wearing a long silk scarf that had fluttered in his wake, like overly feminine aftershave. Sam, on the other hand, brought to mind the kindly, distracted professors who made up my college’s English department, daffy devotees of Milton and Chaucer and bow ties and Scotch.
    Julian folded himself into a chair and Sam squeezed in beside Sylvia.
    “Julian’s here from London for the fall semester,” Sam explained.
    “Teaching at Boston College,” Julian went on.
    “And …?”Sam urged, like a parent prompting a child to add “please” to the end of a sentence.
    “And collaborating on a book with a professor at Harvard.”
    “Wow!” I said. “You’ve got your work cut out for you.”
    “Indeed,” Julian said. “I thought I’d be exploring the Berkshires and popping off to Martha’s Vineyard—or ‘the Vineyard,’ as they say—but …” He trailed off, shrugging. “Not so far.”
    “Julian’s collaborator, Rory Concannon, is an old friend of mine,” Sam offered. “He’s brilliant, but also a little—”
    “Crazy?” Julian offered.
    “Well, I was going to say eccentric, or unconventional.”
    Rory Concannon
, I thought. Another familiar name. What was wrong with me? Why couldn’t I remember where I’d heard these names? Was I getting early-onset Alzheimer’s?
    “No,” Julian said. “He
is
crazy, but in the best possible way.”
    It slowly came back to me as we ordered our lunches and chatted about Professor Concannon and Julian’s work. Julian was one of the two people with whom James Wescott, whose letter Sylvia had just received and whom we had apparently missed in Cambridge, had conferred with about what I now thought of as “our” manuscript.
    Julian and a Dr. Something-or-Other, a woman whose name I (naturally) couldn’t recall, had agreed with Wescott that there was no such thing as a Book of Kildare. All three believed that the “lost” manuscript was actually the Book of Kells, which had simply been
seen
by Gerald of Wales
in
Kildare and had been safe for centuries in the library at Trinity College, Dublin.
    As for Professor Concannon, I suspected I would like him. He couldn’t be that crazy if he was a Harvard professor with a bookcontract, though I suppose there are people who would disagree with that. With a name like Concannon, he was probably also Irish, another check mark in my plus column. In her letter to Finny and Sylvia, Paola Moretti had implored them to take the manuscript to Concannon. This all added up to my feeling that he was probably one of the good guys.
    I took a sip of Christmas Past and tried to get my head around all of this. Sylvia had read the letters to Sam over the phone. This I knew. Sam happened to know that one of the people mentioned in one of the