Page 2 of Here in Your Arms
Oh, the work—the hands-on experience, the access to archives brimming with centuries-old manuscripts—that had always been the goal. But she’d imagined herself doing more than just working and studying. She had envisioned immersing herself in Scotland, soaking up the culture, walking the misty Highlands, tracing the very history she loved so much. She had planned to explore the winding streets of Glasgow, to take weekend trips to Edinburgh, to visit ancient castles and crumbling abbeys, to truly live in this place, not just observe it from behind a desk.
She had tried, at first.
When she arrived, she had gone out a few times with the other student archivists, joining them at pubs and cafés, hoping to form the kind of friendships that would make this experience even richer. But she’d quickly discovered that their interests lay less in history and scholarship and more in pints, parties, and local men.
It wasn’t that she didn’t like them—she did, generally. They were fun, easygoing, full of youthful enthusiasm. But Rose had always been a little different. She hadn’t come here just for the experience. She had come here because she wanted to learn, because she loved history with a passion that went beyond lectures and textbooks.
And so, little by little, she had stopped going out. While the others met for drinks after hours, she stayed behind, pouring over ancient texts and half-forgotten ledgers, savoring the quiet, the thrill of uncovering something unseen for centuries. She hadn’t been a complete recluse, however. She had done her fair share of exploring— had joined guided tours through medieval castles, hiked along mist-shrouded cliffs, and had wandered at least one day through the cobbled closes of Edinburgh. She hadeven seen a few plays at the theatre, sitting alone in the dim glow of the stage lights, letting herself be swept up in the drama of it all.
But most of it had been on her own. And while she didn’t mind her own company, after a while, it had become less and less fun. There was something about experiencing a new place with others, about sharing in the awe of history, the beauty of a landscape, the excitement of a well-told story. And though she had tried—had ventured out, had attempted to be part of it—it had never quite been what she imagined.
Truthfully, she had found more fulfillment here, inside the archives' office, surrounded by crumbling pages and ink-stained history. Maybe that made her boring.
She wasn’t lonely, not really, she regularly told herself. She had her work. She had history. That had always been enough.
By the time Rose emptied her cup of tea from earlier in the afternoon, and collected a pair of white cotton gloves, the building had emptied, the usual shuffle of students and staff replaced by absolute silence.
She genuinely enjoyed her colleagues, and she could spend hours listening to Dr. Fraser when she got on one of her tangents, whether recounting the thrill of an unexpected discovery or relaying some spirited debate she’d had with a fellow historian over the finer points of a medieval script. But if she were being honest, this was Rose’s favorite time of day. Aside from the cleaning staff, who came through a few nights a week, she was completely alone in the building. And she liked it that way. There was something sacred about these late hours, something almost reverent in the stillness. It was just her and the past, stretching out before her in ink and parchment, waiting to be uncovered.
Gloves in hand, Rose grabbed her wool peacoat and left the office she shared with her mentor and several others andheaded upstairs to the second floor reading room. Her coat was needed since the janitor normally turned down the heat significantly before he left for the day. The reading room itself was temperature-controlled and expected to remain around 18 to 20 degrees Celsius, but Rose was convinced it dropped lower overnight.
Outside the reading room, the back offices and the majority of the building—except for the front lobby—smelled mostly of coffee and cigarettes. Inside the reading room, which was lined with towering shelves filled with medieval manuscripts, charters, and crumbling leather-bound volumes, the air had a staleness to it, but there was no food, drink, or smoking allowed, so after any time at her desk it always seemed fresh in here.
She scanned the labels of several cardboard boxes in a group lined up along one side of the room, reading only the parish names, until she found one marked Moy and Dalarossie. It was too large to lift and carry and Rose was forced to drag and push it across the linoleum floor, halfway around the room to the large oak table at the center of the chamber. The table’s surface was smooth and polished from years of careful use, though it still bore the faintest scratches and indentations. It was sturdy and wide enough to accommodate sprawling manuscripts and delicate ledgers, with ample space for notes, reference books, and some of the tools used for handling aged parchment.
A pair of green-shaded banker’s lamp sat on two pedestals at either end of the table, focusing their glow over the workspace, illuminating the brittle pages without exposing them to the harsh glare of overhead fluorescent lighting. Soft felt pads and archival supports were arranged neatly at one end, ready to cradle fragile books at the proper angle, ensuring their spines wouldn’t crack under their own weight. A magnifying glass and a fine-bristled brush sat nearby, essential tools for decipheringfaded script and sweeping away centuries of dust without damaging the ink.
Rose opened the box and then donned the white cotton gloves before she reached for the first of the old ledgers, bringing the book up onto the waist-high table to examine it properly. She expected that most of these would be mundane—grain accounts, livestock records, tedious notations of debts and trade, and the first book did not prove her wrong.
In order to catalog properly, she searched for names and dates, the latter usually written out, such asAnno Domini 1342. Or she might find the date referenced within an event—in the tenth year of King David’s reign—which would mean she would have to cross-reference historical records to confirm the time period. She made notes of any location references and any clues that might advise if the ledger was for estate management, taxation, trade, or legal matters. She expected to find lists of debts, rent paid by tenants, tithes owed to the church, and maybe transactions between merchants. Estate ledgers would generally be filled with records of grain stores, wool production, sheep, cattle, and even a tally of tools and weapons. Rose particularly liked when the scribe or landowner left annotations in the margins, which might be complaints, corrections, or even doodles. Those were often the most interesting discoveries inside estate ledgers, giving her a glimpse into personal attitudes, humor, and frustrations of the time.
Several weeks ago, Rose had come across a very entertaining marginal note.
“Sir Ewan’s new steward cannot count. He tallies twelve pigs, yet there are but ten. He reckons ten geese, yet I have only seen six. Either he is blind, or he is a liar,”had been scribbled along the outside of the page. Rose had assumed the note to have been made by a scribe, a passive-aggressive jab at an incompetent steward or clerk.
One of the first doodles she’d come across was still her favorite. A crudely drawn sketch of a fat cat, sitting smugly near a spilled ink stain had been accompanied by a scribbled note,“The beast of the steward has ruined this page. See how it smirks, whilst I must labor!”
She’d since learned that scribes often drew doodles, especially if they had to rewrite pages due to animal interference—apparently cats were notorious even in the Middle Ages for walking across paper.
By the time she’d thoroughly examined and catalogued three such estate journals, it was well after ten at night. She closed her eyes and rolled her neck, debating if she would tackle one more or call it a day. Tonight, she hadn’t once been amused by any annotations in the margins. There was still, probably, almost a dozen more in the banker’s box.
She glanced down to her right at the box at the same time she reached for the pull chain of one of the lamps with her left hand, having decided that tomorrow was another day. Certainly, as they’d been preserved for centuries, they weren’t going anywhere overnight.
But something in the box caught her attention. The next ledger, on top of the pile in the box, was smaller than the last three, smaller than what Rose was used to. She bent over, frowning a bit at the leather cover, worn to softness, at the impossibly smooth edges, as if it had been handled often, lovingly. As she carefully withdrew it from the box, she realized that a faint imprint of a wax seal still clung to the front cover, half-crumbling from age.
She brought it up on the table and gingerly flipped it open, expecting more of the same—accounts, numbers, tedious tallies—simply in a different book.
Immediately, she recognized that the handwriting was different. Unlike the careful, slanted script of trained scribes andeducated monks, this was uneven, hurried in places, delicate in others, as though the writer had paused between thoughts, hesitating, reconsidering.
She leaned closer, carefully pushing the book along the table toward the light. The ink had faded to a faint brown, barely visible under ordinary light. The words were written in Latin. That was expected—most written records of the time were in Latin. The next thing that jarred her was the structure: this was not written as columns and rows; there were no numbers, only words and the occasional date.
This wasn’t a ledger.
She scanned a page in the middle of the book and translated in her head a few lines."I should be joyful to leave this place, to return to my father’s house. And yet, I do not wish to go.”
Rose’s pulse quickened. This was a journal—a living record!
Her jaw fell, and Rose closed the book slowly, properly, and then opened it again to the beginning. After two blank pages, she found a name neatly written in the top right corner of the page.
