Page 7 of Empire of Shadows

The dreary halls of the PRO were not what Ellie had dreamed of when she had fought her way into University College, achieving the highest possible marks on her entrance exams. She had elected to focus on the study of Ancient History, picking up additional classes in Greek and Latin. She had taught herself to read Egyptian hieroglyphs in her spare time.

Ellie had done all of it in order to prepare herself for a career as an archaeologist. Her stepbrother Neil—now Dr. Fairfax, she reminded herself—had been more or less handed that life on a silver platter when he had graduated from Cambridge. As Ellie sat in Mr. Henbury’s office and watched the rain streak down the glass, Neil was at the ancient and fascinating necropolis of Saqqara in Egypt, excavating a very promising eighteenth-dynasty tomb cluster.

She closed her eyes and imagined the feel of hot sun on her skin as she brushed the debris of centuries away from ancient stones.

Uncovering knowledge lost for millennia was all that Ellie had ever wanted. It had been a ten-year-old Ellie, not Neil, who had come up with the idea of excavating the sedimentation layers under the roses at their semi-detached house in Canonbury. Ellie could still remember her stepmother’s screech of dismay. Florence had not been appeased by Ellie’s insistence that she would put the plants back once she had determined that there were no indications of a Roman camp or Medieval settlement beneath them.

At that tender age, it had never occurred to Ellie that the life she wanted was an impossibility—that no amount of intelligence and determination would ever overcome the handicap of her gender.

Now aged a ripe twenty-four, Ellie knew the limits the world imposed upon women all too well. Working as an archivist had at least allowed her to get her hands on history, if not quite in the way that she had dreamed.

Now, it seemed even that would be taken away from her. She wasn’t entirely certain what would be left once it was gone.

Ellie knew what her stepmother would say… because Florencehadsaid it, more or less once a month for the last three years.

It is far past time you got yourself a husband.

Ellie didn’t want a husband. Marriage would mean the end of any occupation for her besidesmanaging the household—a fate even less desirable than being eaten alive by a boa constrictor.

But what was the alternative? Only teaching, the last resort of most women unfortunate enough to be educated. The thought was more depressing than the weather.

Ellie glanced up at the clock. Mr. Henbury was running late. That was hardly surprising. The man couldn’t even be bothered to arrive on time to lay her off—a moment she was certain he had been eagerly anticipating for years.

Ellie eyed the pile of documents on Mr. Henbury’s desk. The polished surface was almost invisible under a mountain of teetering files and bundles of loose papers. Mr. Henbury’s shelves weren’t much better. Books and files were stuffed onto them in a shocking state of disorganization.

Mr. Henbury was ostensibly responsible for sorting out the fate of any items the archivists weren’t sure how to categorize. As he was terrible at it, the other archivists usually came to Ellie first with their questions about catalog numbers or difficulties translating Old French.

Ellie had prevented quite a few tough nut cases from landing on Mr. Henbury’s messy desk. She allowed herself a small burst of satisfaction at the thought of how much more work he’d be stuck with once she was gone.

Mr. Henbury wasn’t particularly keen on working.

Rising from her chair, Ellie risked a quick glance into the hall. It was empty. Satisfied that she had a moment or two before Mr. Henbury entered wielding the ax of dismissal, she slipped over to the desk and plopped herself down in his chair with a happy little sigh of rebellion.

It should have been her chair, really. She certainly never would’ve let the assistant keeper’s desk become such a muddle.

Ellie glanced idly through the papers, searching for anything her colleagues might have sent along for Mr. Henbury to examine. Such odds and ends occasionally made for interesting reading.

She plucked up a set of agricultural reports and frowned at them. They clearly should have been filed within Section DD 168 over in Room 207.

Shelf A, she thought distantly as she reached for a piece of notepaper.Box 281C.

Ellie caught herself, stifling a huff of frustration. Mr. Henbury was happy enough for her to do his work for him, but he would raise a holy furor should he discover she’d had the temerity to sit at his desk.

Though it pained her, she refrained from noting the proper catalog reference for the reports. Instead, she turned her attention to a promising-looking ledger sandwiched in the middle of one of Mr. Henbury’s stacks. It refused to come loose from the paper mountain until Ellie gave it a more forceful tug—and sent a tower of files sliding to the floor.

“Drat!” she muttered, hurrying around the desk to tidy up the mess.

It would be just her luck for Mr. Henbury to find her rifling through his papers on the floor.

She quickly gathered up an assortment of eighteenth-century shipping logs—CC 467, she noted absently—and then paused as she realized that something lay beneath them. Clutching the thick bundle of documents to her chest, Ellie reached out with her free hand and retrieved it.

It was a black book, moderate in dimensions but fairly stout, tied closed with a faded black ribbon. Ellie recognized it as a psalter—an early printed book of psalms.Calf binding,Ellie thought as she turned it over in her hands.Mid-seventeenth century.

A psalter was most certainly not a government record, and therefore had no business being on the assistant keeper’s desk—or in the PRO at all, really. How it had come to be there at all was a mystery.

Most of the mysteries Ellie encountered in the records office weren’t particularly alluring. She was far more likely to stumble across the mystery of why some long-dead clerk had decided to add extraneous vowels to all of his adverbs or why another had chosen to file a count of the royal herds alongside a translation of Geoffrey of Monmouth.

Ellie hefted the volume thoughtfully in her hand. It felt oddly heavy.

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