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Ellie would notbe asking anyone to bring Mr. Henbury his biscuits.
She kept her back straight as she walked down the long, gloomy hallway to the archivists’ room. As she stepped inside, she was greeted by a rush of schoolboy whispers from a trio of her colleagues who were lingering by the tea service. One of them distinctly chortled under his breath.
Ellie staunchly ignored the sound as she crossed to her desk and sat down in her chair.
Of the six desks in the archivists’ room, Ellie’s was by far the most tidy. Her drawers were neatly labeled:To Be Reviewed, In Process, Inquiry Required, Ready to File. The surface of the desk itself was clear of everything save her desk pad, blotting paper, ink, pen, and letterbox. She slid open the top drawer. It held a box of sharp pen nibs, a stack of perfectly-sized notepaper, and her copy ofThe Short History of the Yuan Dynasty, which she had been enjoying on her lunch breaks.
She took out the pen nibs and the book, slipping them into the leather briefcase on the floor by her chair. Her umbrella was already tucked through the bag’s straps. Ellie checked to make sure they were tightened.
There was nothing else to do. Her only other personal item was a small potted fern on the windowsill behind her station. Given that it wouldn’t fit in her briefcase, she would have to carry it.
Her works in progress were all painstakingly organized. Anyone would be able to pick up from exactly where she had left off without any trouble, so long as they had a modicum of intelligence. Ellie winced at the notion of which of her colleagues might be assigned that responsibility. She hoped it was Mr. Barker. Mr. Lloyd would make an absolute mess of it. Only yesterday, Ellie had barely managed to save a set of maps of Kwangtung Province from being sent by Mr. Lloyd to the Sussex Ordnance Survey file (OS2 665) instead of to Hong Kong (CO 700, Box 3A).
She forced herself to take a breath. There was nothing she could do about it anymore.
It was time to go.
Mr. Henbury’s envelope crinkled in her pocket. She stuffed her hand inside to take it out and pop it into her briefcase—and stopped as her fingers brushed against the calf bound psalter Ellie had knocked off Mr. Henbury’s desk.
She had very nearly walked out with it. How silly of herthatwould have been.
Ellie took the book from her pocket and set it on the desk. She supposed she really ought to bring it back to Mr. Henbury… but the notion of receiving the inevitable self-righteous lecture about misplacing records from a man whose desk looked like the aftermath of a rummage sale made her feel ill.
No—she would simply leave the book here. It would undoubtedly find its way back to Mr. Henbury again, where he’d proceed to lose it once more beneath his paper towers. There was no reason for her to humiliate herself any further.
Mr. Barker glanced over at her, looking uncomfortable and slightly guilty. As a socialist, he likely thought he should speak up about her dismissal but lacked the courage to do it.
The other archivists had forgotten her. They were still dawdling over their tea, talking about cricket.
Leaving the archivists’ room so quickly after entering it felt terribly like running away—likelosing. Ellie mustered a spark of rebellion. She would not let them chase her out. She would take a few extra moments to examine the psalter. That way, she could leave it on her desk with a note as to the proper place where it might be either filed or forwarded.
She untied the black ribbon that held the book closed and lifted the cover to examine the title page. It was written in Latin.Versio Gallicana, she thought reflexively,from Jerome’s second translation of the Septuagint. The Gallicana was a version that had been commonly used in the Roman church during the seventeenth century. That made the psalter unlikely to be English, as the printing of Catholic texts had languished there after the Reformation.
Ellie quickly scanned the rest of the page. A word caught her eye—Salmanticae. The book had been printed in Salamanca, Spain.
It made the book’s presence in the mess of PRO documents on Mr. Henbury’s desk even more intriguing. How had a Spanish psalter, of all things, landed in the British records office?
Idly, Ellie flipped through a few more pages… and stared down at a mutilation.
Past Psalm Four—Give ear unto me when I call—the interior of the book had been raggedly cut out, the pages gutted to create a secret hollow.
Ellie had to stifle a muted squeak of horror at the sight. The Versio Gallicana was common enough, but when dealing with a book of such venerable age, every volume had to be considered historically valuable. It felt like sacrilege that someone would carve out a square from the middle of the pages.
The hollow in the book had not been left empty. There was a folded piece of parchment inside, yellowed with age. Gingerly, Ellie lifted it out.
The document was oddly heavy for its size. A few lines of faded brown script—iron gall ink, Ellie distractedly noted—were visible on the outside surface of the neatly bundled package of it. Those had also been written in Latin. Ellie struggled a tad with the quirks of the ecclesiastical spelling as she translated it.
Map indicating the location of the Inhabited Kingdom discovered by Fr. Salavert, which May Be Supposed to lie behind the legends of The White City.
Ellie blinked down at the lines and forced herself to check her translation again.
Words leapt out at her.Inhabited Kingdom. White City.
The White City was indeed a legend—a myth that had woven its way through the Spanish conquest of South and Central America. The rumors of a flourishing Indigenous settlement of untold riches were often seen as a variation on the more well-known story of El Dorado.
The allure of the White City’s wealth was a golden fever-dream that had led countless explorers and adventurers to their deaths.
It was nonsense, of course. The Mayan civilization had flourished in Mexico and Central America for over a thousand years, only to mysteriously collapse sometime between 800 and 1000 AD, centuries before the arrival of the Spanish. The great ruined cities that had been discovered in the Yucatan and further south had been just that—ruins—by the time the first Europeans had reached the region. The Mayan people who remained had lived in smaller villages and settlements that were quickly ravaged by disease, forced relocation, slavery, and murder during the conquest.
