He had written to Mara Leclerc on a Wednesday evening, which was three days after Ambrose had given him her name and eleven days after he had found her email address in the Vatican Archive's staff directory and opened a new email and then closed it without writing anything.
The second time he opened it he wrote four sentences. He introduced himself, named Ambrose as the connection, confirmed that he had materials relevant to the notation system she had been researching, and said he would be glad to correspond if she was willing. He read the four sentences three times, changed one word in the third sentence, and sent it before he could revise it further.
He had not heard back by Thursday, which was not surprising - Rome was seven hours ahead and a four-sentence email from a stranger in Illinois was not the kind of thing that required an immediate response. He drove to St. Louis with the particular quality of attention of a man who is waiting for something without wanting to appear to be waiting.
The meeting proceeded in its established rhythm. Daniel had decoded another eight percent of the marginalia, bringing the total to sixty percent - past the midpoint now, the remaining sections beginning to yield their structure more readily as the decoded portions illuminated the cipher's underlying logic. Claire had cross-referenced the seal device Joshua had found in the safety deposit box against a catalog of medieval ecclesiastical seals she had been compiling for eleven years, and had found three partial matches that narrowed the provenance significantly - a specific scriptorium in the south of France, active between 1280 and 1340, which placed the document's creation within a generation of the events it described.
Joshua presented the findings from Mara's staff page - her publication record, her current research focus, the three-year arc of her work on the Barcelona collection - and the group received this with the specific quality of attention they brought to things that confirmed what they had suspected. Margaret said that Teodor had mentioned her in a letter, years ago, which was the first time Margaret had mentioned Teodor in a personal context, and which Joshua filed and did not pursue.
He was gathering the photographs into their folder near the end of the meeting when he mentioned Aldric Renner.
He mentioned him the way you mention a professional encounter - the way you mention traffic or weather or a colleague seen at a conference. A historian in Chicago, he said, working on the philosophical history of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, recommended by Paul Whitfield at Washington University. They had met for coffee in Clayton the previous week. Interesting work, overlapping territory, he'd read the paper on the Franciscan manuscript.
Ambrose went still.
Not dramatically. Not visibly, to anyone who hadn't spent four months in this room learning to read the specific registers of Ambrose's attention. But Joshua had spent four months in this room, and he saw it - a quality of stillness that was different from Ambrose's usual stillness, a quality that had something underneath it that the usual stillness did not have.
"What does he want to know?" Ambrose said.
Joshua looked at him. "He was interested in the notation system. He said he'd encountered it in two other manuscripts he was working with."
A pause. The sanctuary lamp burned above the altar. Outside, the April night was doing what April nights did in this part of the country - neither fully winter nor fully spring, the temperature unable to commit.
"What did you tell him?"
"That I was still working on it."
Ambrose nodded. He reached for his coat. The gesture completed the sentence in a way that closed the subject without dismissing it - filed, not forgotten, to be returned to when Ambrose determined it was time to return to it. Joshua recognized the pattern. He did not press.
He drove home on Route 3 turning the exchange over in the specific way he turned things over - running it back, replaying the exact quality of the pause, the specific weight of two questions asked and then released. He could not locate precisely what had changed in the room when he said the name. He knew something had changed. He filed this.
The email from Rome was in his inbox when he got home.
He saw it from across the kitchen - the preview line visible on his phone where he had left it on the counter - and he stood for a moment before picking it up, which was not something he usually did with his phone.
Dr. Mara Leclerc. Vatican Apostolic Archive. Sent at 11:47 p.m. Rome time, which was 4:47 p.m. in Alton, which meant she had written it the same afternoon he had been at the Thursday meeting, which was not significant and which he noted anyway.
The email was two paragraphs. The first paragraph confirmed what he had written - she knew Ambrose, she had been in correspondence with Teodor, she had been following the Barcelona thread for three years, she had been waiting for this contact. The second paragraph was careful in a way he recognized from her published work - she had a question, she said, that she had been holding for some time and which his email had made it possible to ask. She would understand if he preferred to wait, but she wanted him to know the question was there.
She did not ask the question in the email.
He read both paragraphs twice. He put the phone down and made coffee and stood at the kitchen window looking at the street in the dark for a while. A car he didn't recognize was parked in front of the house across the street. The maple in the front yard was coming into leaf - late this year, the cold having held longer than usual.
He picked up the phone and read the email again.
He thought about her final note in the Lost Crown - the note he had read in his grandfather's library, in the chapter Teodor had asked her to write herself. I am trying. Two words at the end of a chapter about patience and waiting and the long correspondence that had ended with eight words from an eighty-three-year-old man who had been keeping the record for sixty-one years.
He opened a reply.
He wrote more than four sentences this time. He wasn't sure how many - he didn't count them, which was unlike him. He wrote until he had said what needed to be said, which took longer than he expected and which felt, when he finished, less like composing an email than like completing something that had been left incomplete for a long time.
He read it once. He sent it.
He closed the laptop and went to the study and stood in front of the library for a while, looking at the organized shelves, the shape of what his grandfather had built. The event-date system. The map of the thing. The books waiting in their particular order for whoever came after.
He was whoever came after.
He turned off the light and went to bed and slept without difficulty for the first time in several weeks.