"Um… I hadn't really thought about it. I can sleep wherever."

"Indeed."

I could feel my face flaring with light like a high-school fire alarm, and rapidly tried to ameliorate the situation. "What I mean is, I'm easy."Urgh. Worser and worser, as Alice might say. There are times when I shouldn't be allowed out of the house without a muzzle.

"Easy to have as a houseguest, I mean," I specified in a strangledvoice, hoisting my bag farther up on my shoulder.

"I think the hospitality of Selwick Hall can stretch to providing you a bed," commented Colin drily, leading the way up a flight of stairs tucked away to one side of the hall.

"That's nice to know. Very generous of you."

"Too much hassle clearing out the dungeons," explained Colin, twisting open a door not far from the landing, revealing a medium-sized room possessed of a dark four-poster bed. The walls were dark green, patterned with gold-tinted animals that looked like either dragons or gryphons, squatting on their haunches, stylized wings poking into the forequar-ters of the next beast over. He stepped aside to let me precede him.

Dumping my bag onto the bed, I turned back around to face Colin, who was still propping up the door. I shoved my hair out of my eyes. "Thanks. Really. It's really nice of you to have me here."

Colin didn't mouth any of the usual platitudes about it being no problem, or being delighted to have me. Instead, he tipped his head in the direction of the hall and said, "The loo is two doors down to your left, the hot water tends to cut out after ten minutes, and the flush needs to be jiggled three times before it settles."

"Right," I said. He got points for honesty, at least. "Got it. Loo on the left, two jiggles."

"Three jiggles," Colin corrected.

"Three," I repeated firmly, as though I was actually going to remember. I trailed along after Colin down the hallway.

"Eloise?" A few yards ahead, Colin was holding open a door at the end of the hall.

"Sorry!" I scurried down the length of the hall to catch up, plunging breathless through the doorway. Crossing my arms over my chest, I said, a little too heartily, "So this is the library."

There certainly couldn't be any doubt on that score; never had a room so resembled popular preconception. The walls were paneled in rich, dark wood, although the finish had worn off the edges in spots, where books had scraped against the wood in passing one too many times. A whimsical iron staircase curved to the balcony, the steps narrowing into pie-shaped wedges that promised a broken neck to the unwary. I tilted my head back, dizzied by the sheer number of books, row upon row, more than the most devoted bibliophile could hope to consume in a lifetime of reading. In one corner, a pile of crumbling paperbacks — James Bond, I noticed, squinting sideways, in splashy seventies covers — struck a slightly incongruous note. I spotted a moldering pile of Country Life cheek by jowl with a complete set of Trevelyan's History of England in the original Victorian bindings. The air was rich with the smell of decaying paper and old leather bindings.

Downstairs, where I stood with Colin, the shelves made way for four tall windows, two to the east and two to the north, all hung with rich red draperies checked with blue, in the obverse of the red-flecked blue carpet. On the west wall, the bookshelves surrendered pride of place to a massive fireplace, topped with a carved hood to make Ivanhoe proud, and large enough to roast a serf.

In short, the library was a Gothic fantasy.

My face fell.

"It's not original."

"No, you poor innocent," said Colin. "The entire house was gutted not long before the turn of the century. The last century," he added pointedly.

"Gutted?" I bleated.

Oh, fine, I know it's silly, but I had harbored romantic images of walking where the Purple Gentian had walked, sitting at the desk where he had penned those hasty notes upon which the fate of the kingdom rested, viewing the kitchen where his meals had been prepared… I made a disgusted face at myself. At this rate, I was only one step away from going through the Purple Gentian's garbage, hugging his discarded port bottles to my palpitating bosom.

"Gutted," repeated Colin firmly.

"The floor plan?" I asked pathetically.

"Entirely altered."

"Damn."

The laugh lines at the corners of his mouth deepened.

"I mean," I prevaricated, "what a shame for posterity."

Colin raised an eyebrow. "It's considered one of the great examples of the arts and crafts movement. Most of the wallpaper and drapes were designed by William Morris, and the old nursery has fireplace tiles by Burne-Jones."

"The Pre-Raphaelites are distinctly overrated," I said bitterly.

Colin strolled over to the window, hands behind his back. "The gardens haven't been changed. You can always go for a stroll around the grounds if the Victorians begin to overwhelm you."

"That won't be necessary," I said, with as much dignity as I could muster. "All I need are your archives."

"Right," said Colin briskly, turning away from the window. "Let's get you set, then, shall we?"

"Do you have a muniments room?" I asked, tagging along after him.

"Nothing so grand." Colin strode straight towards one of the bookcases, causing me a momentary flutter of alarm. The books on the shelf certainly looked elderly — at least, if the dust on the spines was anything to go by — but they were all books. Printed matter. When Mrs. Selwick-Alderly had said there were records at Selwick Hall, she hadn't specified what kind of records. For all I knew, she might well have meant one of those dreadful Victorian vanity publications compiled from "missing" records, entitled, "Some Documents Formerly in the Possession of the Selwick Family But Tragically Dropped Down a Privy Last Year." They never cited their sources, and they tended to excerpt only those bits they found interesting, cutting out anything that might not redound to the greater credit of the ancestry.

But Colin bypassed the rows of leather-bound books. Instead, he hunkered down in front of the elaborately carved mahogany wainscoting that ran, knee-high, around the length of the room, in a movement as smooth as it was unexpected.

"Hunh?" I nearly tripped over him, stopping so short that one of my knees banged into his shoulder blades. Grabbing the edge of a bookshelf to steady myself, I stared down in bewilderment as Colin bent over the wooden paneling, his head blocking my view of whatever it was he was doing. All I could see was sun-streaked hair, darker at the roots as the effects of summer faded, and an expanse of bent back, broad and muscled beneath an oxford-cloth shirt. A whiff of shampoo, recently applied, wafted up against the stuffy smells of closed rooms, old books, and decaying leather.

I couldn't see what he was doing, but he must have turned some sort of latch, because the wainscoting opened out, the join cleverly disguised by the pattern of the wood. Now that I knew what to look for, there was nothing mysterious about it at all. Glancing around the room, I could see that the wainscoting was flush with the edge of the shelves above, leaving a space about two feet deep unaccounted for.

"These are all cupboards," Colin explained briefly, swinging easily to his feet beside me.

"Of course," I said, as if I had known all along, and never harbored alarming images of being forced to read late-Victorian transcriptions.

One thing was sure: I need have no worries about having to entertain myself with back issues of Punch. There were piles of heavy folios bound in marbled endpapers, a scattering of flat cardboard envelopes looped shut with thin spools of twine, and whole regiments of the pale gray acid-free boxes used to hold loose documents.

"How could you have kept this to yourself all these years?" I exclaimed, falling to my knees in front of the cupboard.

"Very easily," said Colin drily.

I flapped a dismissive hand in his general direction, without interrupting my perusal. I scooted forwards to see better, tilting my head sideways to try to read the typed labels someone had glued to the spines a long time ago, if their yellowed state and the shape of the letters were anything to go by. The documents seemed to be roughly organized by person and date. The ancient labels said things like LORD RICHARD SELWICK (1776 — 1841), CORRESPONDENCE, MISCELLANEOUS, 1801 — 1802. Or SELWICK HALL, HOUSEHOLD ACCOUNTS, 1800 — 1806. Bypassing the household accounts, I kept looking. I reached for a folio at random, drawing it carefully out from its place next to a little pocket-sized book bound in worn red leather.

"I'll leave you to it, shall I?" said Colin.

"Mmm-hmm."

The folio was a type I recognized from the British Library, older documents pasted onto the leaves of a large blank book, with annotations around the edges in a much later hand. On the first page, an Edwardian hand had written in slanting script, "Correspondence of Lady Henrietta Selwick, 1801-1803."

"Dinner in an hour?"

"Mmm-hmm."

I flipped deliberately towards the back, scanning salutations and dates. I was looking for references to two things: the Pink Carnation, or the school for spies founded by the Purple Gentian and his wife, after necessity forced them to abandon active duty. Neither the Pink Carnation nor the spy school had been in operation much before May of 1803. Wedging the volume back into place, I jiggled the next one out from underneath, hoping that they had been stacked in some sort of chronological order.