Untitled A Booklover's Mystery

A room without books is like a body without a soul. --Cicero Finding the world's rarest book in my library that Sunday afternoon was a bibliophile's dream. But now I'd give anything if I hadn't caught a glimpse of its hiding place behind my bookshelves. For while that outwardly charming volume fascinated and delighted the bibliomaniac world, it held dangerous secrets--secrets that not only ignited hostilities that had simmered for a millennium, but took from me everything I held most precious. On that unforgettable afternoon I sat at my desk in the library, scrawling American addresses on ivory wedding invitation envelopes--hundreds of them. Sarah Townsend, my intended, had insisted my handwriting was infinitely preferable to that of the commercial calligraphers she knew. I wasn't sure I agreed, but anything for Sarah. A few hundred envelopes? Delighted, my love. It was also infinitely preferable to the nasty task of home maintenance that awaited me outside. One of our ancient oaks, which had been ailing for several years, had keeled over against the house in a violent gale the previous week. It was still perched there, waiting to cause a new disaster. I'd intended to get to it that weekend, but . . . The doorbell rang. I checked my watch as I rose and went to the door, stretching luxuriously. Four o'clock on a Sunday afternoon. TheSunday Timeswas still strewn about the sofa in pleasant disarray, its rumours of deepening hostilities between America and Iraq as remote as those faraway deserts. Even the lesser evil of a flu epidemic in London seemed remote, with the roses blooming and the birds singing outside the open French doors. Ah, but life was good here at the Orchard, long the family home of the Plumtree clan. The oak could wait. And it was time for tea. I swung open the door, enjoying its characteristic creak on the old hinge. "Max!" I exclaimed. "What a pleasant surprise. I was just going to put the kettle--" "Sorry, Alex." My brother pushed past me, all business, into the hallway. "I need to borrow a book, if you don't mind. Sorry to disturb." "Not at all," I murmured. I closed the front door and followed him into the library. I was used to Max's brief enthusiasms, his frequent small emergencies. I understood him well: He was simply a more concentrated version of myself. Emotionally, Max was more mercurial; physically, he was smaller and darker. He went straight to the shelf of reference books. I watched him, as I leaned against my desk. "I've just been addressing the invitations for the Nantucket ceremony," I began to explain. "Ah," he said distractedly, clearly not hearing a word I'd said. The vows I would take in little more than two months were not uppermost in his mind. "I read in the paper this morning that aliens contacted the Queen. They spoke through her corgis at a polo match in Windsor Great Park." "That's nice," he muttered, continuing to search through the richly stocked shelves--a bit wildly, it seemed to me. He was certainly in a flap about something. "Not there," he said. "Damn! A client of mine--an anonymous one, funnily enough--said he'd already tried Maggs. They couldn't help him. So if I could, it'd be a coup. And I know we had that volume here . . . that heraldry volume Dad was forever showing us. I won't sell ours, of course, but at least my client could see it. And," Max said with exaggerated emphasis, quite pleased with himself, "if I have to meet with him, I can find out who he is. The book was a private issue, you know, a Dibdin Club edition. I have the impression he's after a more modern volume than the one we have, but I can't exactly remember the date of ours." "Yes, I know the one you mean. It must be here somewhere." I went to a different wall of shelves to hKaewert, Julie is the author of 'Untitled A Booklover's Mystery', published 1999 under ISBN 9780553577174 and ISBN 0553577174.