“Possibly.” She leaned in for a closer look, and placed her hand directly on the page.
I felt my mouth fall open but I caught myself in time and didn’t comment. I’d assumed, from her refusal to allow the diary to be moved or copied, that Claudine would have concerns about the way that it was handled. I had done a detailed search on how to work with paper artifacts. I’d hunted down a shop that sold supplies designed for libraries and archives, and I’d built myself a kit of sorts to bring with me—a desktop beanbag pillow to support the diary in a way that spared its fragile spine, and little leather weights to gently hold the pages open while I worked. And even though the current state of research seemed divided as to whether the advantages of wearing gloves outweighed the disadvantages, I’d erred upon the side of caution and brought several pairs of cotton gloves to keep the paper safe from the potentially destructive oils that, regardless of how many times I washed my hands, remained on my own fingers.
I might simply have concluded that Claudine was one of those who thought that gloves were not desirable or necessary when one touched old paper, and that keeping one’s hands clean and dry was all that was required, except I’d seen her not five minutes earlier spill coffee on that same hand when she’d set her cup down on the desk, and all she’d done was wipe it dry with tissue, and that hand was now laid full upon the diary.
The coffee on the desk had been enough to make me wonder, with the diary sitting open so close by, but I had held my tongue then too, recalling Jacqui’s years of telling me that pointing out another person’s faults was rarely wise. And it was Claudine’s diary, after all. Not mine.
I looked away deliberately and focused on the other features of the room instead. I liked this room. It was much smaller than the others I had so far seen within the house, and set just off the entry hall across from the salon, so that its windows—there were two, set close together—overlooked the narrow terrace and the front drive with its chestnut trees. The floor was done in hardwood in the same herringbone pattern as the salon and the dining room and overlaid, as they were, with an oriental carpet, and the walls were painted warmly yellow, making things feel cozier. I liked the desk, too. It was large and serviceable, made for work and not for decoration, and had room enough for me to set the diary on its pillow in the middle with my working papers and my pencils to the right, and still leave ample space for the ceramic table lamp that squatted to the left, its large shade angled perfectly to cast light where I needed it.
But best of all, there was no second chair in here—no place for someone else to sit and socialize while I was working. I could work, as Jacqui had assured me I’d be able to, alone.
My cousin, knowing I preferred to work with no one else around me, had considerately stayed to drink her coffee in the dining room, where I could hear her talking now in English with Denise and Luc, no doubt attempting to keep them both there as well, and let me have my breathing space.
But it was Claudine’s house, and Claudine’s diary, and I couldn’t tell her not to come along, and not to touch it.
“Yes, I think it might be Harrison,” she said at last, and straightened.
As her fingers left the page I looked for any signs of damage to the paper and found none, although I knew such damage could take time to show.
“Your cousin,” Claudine told me, “when she came last June to see this, could not make that word out either. Nor this one.”
“That’s ‘Frisque.’ See how she writes her F’s, and then the s? It’s probably a dog’s name, as she says that she ‘attends to’ Frisque by walking outside in the cold, and then they both come back indoors. A dog’s the only pet that people walk and bring indoors again. At least the only pet that I can think of.”
“So she had a dog? How very clever of you, spotting that.”
I didn’t think it all that clever. I had seen some samples of old documents, old handwriting, and I’d been braced to find this entry of the diary tricky to transcribe, but in fact Mary Dundas had written her words in a very clear hand. It was fairly elaborate, and she wrote her l’s and her t’s in a manner that made it a bit of a chore to tell one from the other, but still it was perfectly legible.
Claudine leaned over again to touch three little blots in the margin. “And what are these, do you think? Numbers?”
“They could be.” I’d brought a magnifying glass with me as well, on the advice of the shopkeeper from whom I’d bought my archival supplies, and I lifted it now to examine that part of the page. The three marks had been meant to conceal what she’d written beneath, as she’d done with the name of the woman she’d met at Sir Redmond’s. “Yes, they’re numbers. That’s eight, and that’s nine. And that last one,” I said, “might be ten. I’m not certain.”
“A key to the cipher, perhaps?”
“Not the key. That would be on its own separate paper, it’s probably lost. But the numbers might still be a clue of some kind.” I had glanced at the pages that followed—no words, only numbers divided by points, looking just like the cipher that Alistair had given Jacqui to test me with. Only it wasn’t the same. “I don’t know, it’s a lot of effort to go to for something so commonplace,” I said, choosing to ignore that I’d done much the same thing years ago when I’d encrypted all my school notes. “She’d have had to work out what she wanted to write down, and then translate it into cipher. All these pages. That would take a lot of time.”