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A rising excitement began to itch at the back of Ellie’s mind. She worked to wrangle it into a suitably scholarly submission.
Just fairy tales and hokum, she thought forcefully to herself as she continued her careful, rational examination.
Key river mouths were marked on the map from Box 8, though their routes extended only a few miles from the shoreline. Pirates, after all, had little need to navigate far inland.
On the map from the psalter, one river traced its way much further into the interior, where the other landmarks—like theBlack Pillarand theArch Hollowed by the Hand of God—peppered the page. The undulating line looked as though it had been drawn based upon the report of someone who had traveled far beyond the boundaries of the colonial settlements into unexplored territory.
Only one coastal community was named on the parchment—a site labeled with a carefully inscribed cross and the initialsS. P. F.
Ellie turned her attention to the pirates’ map, where over a dozen villages had been drawn along the meandering line of the shore—Port des Chevaux… San Cristóbal… Coban…
At the southern end of what was now the colony of British Honduras lay another dot—and the neatly written name ofSan Pedro de Flores
Ellie’s pulse kicked up. She yanked Box 8 closer and quickly shuffled through the other papers inside. She plucked out a block cut, printed map from the mid-eighteenth century—approximately seventy years later—and studied it furiously.
The place where the mission of San Pedro de Flores should have been was blank. The mission, then, had not survived long into the eighteenth century.
If the map from the psalter was a forgery, whoever had created it must have had access to an extraordinary archive of historical maps, as well as possessing the skills to do a very fine job artificially aging both the material and the ink.
Or else the document really had been drawn two hundred and seventy-odd years ago.
Ellie leaned back against the shelf of records, her eyes wide.
It could still be a hoax—a very old and very convincing hoax.
But as a woman of logic and science, Ellie had to consider the alternative possibility that her discovery was exactly what it appeared to be… a map to an unknown civilization.
?
After properly refiling the documents in Room 306, Ellie wandered downstairs in a daze. She was surprised to realize that her feet had taken her to Mr. Henbury’s door—but then, Mr. Henbury’s door was the responsible place for her to go. For all his numerous faults, Mr. Henbury was still the Assistant Keeper of the Rolls. Stumbling across the potential key to an immense archaeological discovery hiding amongst the records was surely the sort of thing Ellie was supposed to bring to his attention.
Her heart sank at the prospect, bringing her to a halt in the hall. She had absolutely no doubt that the moment she gave the map and medallion to Mr. Henbury, she would be cut out of whatever happened next. That would have been true even if she hadn’t just been handed her dismissal papers for a bit of high-principled rioting.
A terrible little thought slipped into her mind. Mr. Henbury was clearly unaware of the existence of the artifacts in her pocket. If he had opened the psalter, he hardly would’ve left it lying around in his stacks of papers. Even someone as dim and self-absorbed as Mr. Henbury would have recognized their significance. If Mr. Henbury had seen them, he would have forwarded them to either the British Museum or the Royal Geographical Society, the two organizations best qualified to further assess the provenance of the map and potentially mount an expedition to the region.
An expedition…
Ellie imagined pushing her way through the virgin rainforest, following the winding path of a game trail as the orchids bloomed around her and tropical birds chattered overhead. She would be carrying basic survey equipment with her, of course. Even a preliminary investigation of a potential archaeological site should entail a thorough documentation of the visible structures.
She might even lay a small grid in a promising location and dig a few test pits. A cluster of chipped stone could turn out to be a remnant of flint knapping activity while a layer of crushed shells might indicate a midden or the site of a past feast.
Trash heaps, she thought with a dreamy sigh. What she wouldn’t give to sink her hands into a lovely, ancient trash heap and pull out all those wonderful details about the real lives of people from a thousand years ago.
Of course, that was pure fantasy. No self-respecting British institution was going to fund sending someone likeherto the other side of the world.
The daydream crashed to the ground, and Ellie realized that there were people speaking on the far side of Mr. Henbury’s office door.
One of them, unsurprisingly, was Mr. Henbury. He sounded oddly nervous.
“I’m telling you, it was right here this morning,” he said. “I haven’t moved it anywhere. I hardly ever move any of these things!”
“Spread this all out.”
The other voice in the room was deep and authoritative, for all that it betrayed just a hint of a less-than-respectable accent—a subtle note of the East End, Ellie deduced absently. Ellie certainly hadn’t heard it in the records office before, which meant that it didn’t belong to someone who worked here.
Even slightly muffled by the interruption of Mr. Henbury’s door, the voice reminded Ellie vaguely of the cold wind before a storm.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Jacobs,” Mr. Henbury said. “As you can see, there isn’t really a great deal of room—”
