Being a baby, I learned very quickly, is humiliating.
Nobody warns you about this. In all the reincarnation stories I'd half-read on my phone between train stations, the hero always seemed to skip straight from being born to being a precocious five-year-old astonishing the adults around him. Those stories left out a great deal. They left out that a newborn can't hold up his own head. That he can't roll over, or scratch his nose, or tell anyone the blanket is too hot, or that his left foot has gone numb from being folded under him for twenty minutes, or that he would very much like to be put down now, thank you.
They also left out the diapers.
I won't dwell on the diapers. I'll say only that I had been a grown man with a university degree and a respectable job, and I was now a grown man trapped in a body that did whatever it liked whenever it liked, while a gruff old woman cleaned up after me and commented loudly on the results. There is a specific kind of dignity you lose in that situation, and you never entirely get it back.
Berta's commentary came in a language I didn't understand yet, but the meaning was never in doubt. She'd hold the soiled cloth at arm's length, wrinkle her nose, and demand of the ceiling, "Another one?" before turning on me with something I later learned translated, roughly, as Where do you put it all? You eat like a sparrow. I would stare up at the beams and try very hard to be somewhere else.
Where I actually was, it turned out, was called the annex.
I learned the building the way a newborn learns anything: in blurry pieces, one sense at a time. Sounds came first. The groan of the floorboards under Berta's weight, a different note for each board, so that within a week I could track her across the room with my eyes shut. The rattle of a loose pane in the window whenever the wind came out of the north. The tick of the stove as it cooled at night. And, every time it rained, which was often, the slow drip of a leak somewhere in the ceiling of the next room, landing in what sounded like a tin bucket. I started counting the drips to give my mind something to hold. Forty-one a minute in a light rain. Up to ninety in a heavy one.
Then the smells. Woodsmoke. Damp stone. Lavender, which Berta kept in little cloth bags tucked into the corners of every drawer to fight the mildew, so that every piece of cloth that touched me carried a faint, dusty purple scent. Porridge in the mornings. Goat.
There was a great deal of goat.
The shapes came last, as my eyes improved over the first weeks. My room was small and square, its whitewashed walls gone grey with age, a brown water stain spreading from one upper corner. The ceiling was low and crossed by dark beams. There was one window, its glass thick and full of bubbles that warped the outside world into green and grey smears. My cradle sat close to the stove. Berta's narrow bed stood against the opposite wall, with a chair beside it, a wash basin on a stand, and a chest of drawers whose bottom drawer never quite closed, no matter how hard she kicked it.
Much later, once I could walk and explore, I would learn the rest. The annex was a squat two-story building of grey stone, connected to the main house of the Valtier estate only by a long covered walkway that no one used anymore. A century earlier it had been built for some Duke's widowed mother. After her death it became guest quarters, then storage, then nothing in particular. Half its rooms were shut up under dust sheets. The roof leaked in three places. The chimney in the east wing had been blocked by a bird's nest for as long as anyone could remember.
It was, in short, exactly the kind of place a noble family put things it wanted to forget about.
That included me.
On my eighth or ninth day of life, a man came to the annex.
I knew him by his boots before I saw him. They were the same heavy, crisp boots that had come into the room the night my mother died, with the same precise, unhurried rhythm on the boards. They stopped in the doorway, and a voice spoke, dry and formal as a printed notice.
I turned my head as far as my neck would go. A tall, thin man stood just inside the door in a dark coat with silver buttons, holding a single sheet of paper. He had a long face and a grey beard trimmed to an exact edge, and he was looking around my little room the way a person looks at a stain they've been told to deal with.
I would learn, much later, that his name was Harlan, that he was head steward of the Valtier household, and that he was neither cruel nor kind. He was simply a man who did what he was told, perfectly, and didn't think about it afterward.
He read from the paper. It took some time. Berta stood very straight beside my cradle, hands folded over her apron, lips pressed into a thin white line.
When Harlan finished, Berta exploded.
I didn't understand a word. I didn't need to. Her hands flew up. She pointed at me. She pointed through the window toward the main house. She jabbed a finger into her own chest and shook her head and launched into something long and furious that ended in a single word she spat out as if it tasted bad. Her voice climbed until the loose pane buzzed in its frame.
My stomach dropped, as far as a stomach that size can drop. She doesn't want me, I thought. She's being made to look after me, and she hates it.
It added up. Why would she want to? She'd been a nursemaid in the main house, caring for the Duke's real children, the ones who counted. Now she was being sent to a drafty, leaking outbuilding at the edge of the estate to raise a dead maid's unwanted bastard. Of course she was furious. I tallied up my position, with no wet nurse, no father, and one caretaker who resented me, and didn't like the total.
Harlan heard the whole tirade without a flicker. When she finally ran out of breath, he said one short sentence, folded his paper in half and then in half again, nodded once, and left.
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The boots faded down the corridor. The outer door banged.
Berta stood absolutely still, head cocked, listening.
Then she turned, bent over my cradle, and kissed me on the forehead.
She was smiling. Not a little. Hugely, with her whole face, her eyes wet and creased deep at the corners. She scooped me out of the cradle, held me against her shoulder, and did a slow, lumbering little dance around the room, slippers scuffing on the boards, humming under her breath. Five notes, climbing and falling. My mother's tune.
I was so thoroughly confused that I forgot to be embarrassed about being danced with.
It was months before I understood what had happened. When I finally had enough of the language, Berta explained it herself one evening, chuckling, a darning needle flashing in and out of the heel of a sock. "If I'd looked happy about it, that woman would've sent someone else. Someone who'd have let you starve, most like. So I made a fuss. Told Harlan it was an insult, a woman of my experience, sent off to wipe the bottom of a maid's brat in a moldy shed. Told him I'd only do it because I was ordered to, and I'd be complaining about it till the day I died." She snorted and pulled the thread tight. "He wrote it all down, too. Went straight back and told her ladyship. And she was so pleased I was miserable that she never once thought of moving me." She bit off the thread and looked at me over the top of the sock. "Thirty years in service, lad. You learn a few things."
That woman, of course, was the Duchess. But I didn't know that yet either.
Berta wasn't the only person in the annex, at least at first.
There was a footman, a tall, quiet young man with large ears that went red in the cold, who carried firewood and water and almost never spoke. There was a laundress named Elke, plump and freckled, who came three times a week and sang loudly and badly over the washtub, so that I could tell laundry days by the noise alone. And there was old Tomas.
Tomas was the handyman. He was nearly as old as Berta, bald and brown and wrinkled as a walnut, with enormous knotted hands and a pipe I never once saw lit. He fixed what could be fixed in the annex and patched what couldn't, and spent most of his time in a lean-to shed out back, which he shared with the goat.
The goat was the most important member of the household.
The kitchen milk Berta had begged that first night was never going to last, and nobody in the main house was going to send more. So on my second day of life, Berta had gone to Tomas, and Tomas had gone to a farmer he knew in the village, and that evening he'd come back up the lane leading a scruffy brown-and-white nanny goat on a rope.
She had a long, narrow face, yellow eyes with flat sideways pupils, and an expression of permanent aristocratic disapproval. She ate everything. She butted anyone who turned their back on her. She once ate one of Berta's aprons off the washing line, strings and all, while Elke stood frozen with a basket on her hip, too frightened to step in.
Berta named her the Duchess.
She never said it in front of anyone from the main house, of course. But every morning she stomped out to the lean-to with a bucket, muttering, "Come on then, your ladyship, give us some milk, you bad-tempered old thing," and Tomas laughed so hard he had to sit down on an upturned crate.
I didn't get the joke until much later. When I finally did, I laughed so hard I gave myself hiccups.
The Duchess's milk kept me alive. Berta warmed it every few hours, day and night, and fed it to me first with a twist of rag, and later from a little spouted cup that Tomas carved out of a cow's horn. He spent two whole evenings by the stove smoothing the rim with a flat chip of whetstone, then running it along the inside of his own lip to test it, over and over, until he was satisfied it wouldn't hurt my gums. After the milk came thin porridge, then mashed turnip, then bread soaked in broth.
Some evenings, when Berta needed both hands for mending, Tomas took a turn with me. He'd sit in the chair by the stove and hold me in the crook of one huge arm as easily as a loaf of bread, his sleeve smelling of sawdust and cold pipe tobacco, and talk to me in a low, rumbling voice. I didn't understand a word. But he talked to me the way you'd talk to someone you fully expected to understand eventually, slowly and seriously, pointing at things as he named them. The stove. The window. His pipe. His own nose, which he let me grab, and which was warm and surprisingly soft and had a small white scar across the bridge.
Once, he led the goat to the doorway on her rope so I could see her. The Duchess studied me with her sideways yellow eyes for a long, considering moment. Then she sneezed, turned around, and started chewing on the doorframe.
Tomas laughed until he wheezed and had to thump his own chest. He said something that sounded very much like She likes you.
I had my doubts. But I decided that if I was going to owe my life to a goat, I could at least be polite about it.
It wasn't a luxurious life. It wasn't remotely the life of a duke's son. But I was warm, and fed, and held. And every night, before she pinched out the candle, Berta tucked the blanket around me with her rough, careful hands, grumbling the entire time about drafts and leaks and the price of lamp oil, and then rested one palm flat on my chest for a moment, just over my heart, before she went to her own bed.
I didn't mind the grumbling at all.
All through those early weeks, I kept trying to find the Library.
Close your eyes and think of the smell of old paper, the Keeper had said. The door will be there.
So I tried. Every time I was awake and calm and not crying or eating or being changed, which wasn't often, I shut my eyes and concentrated as hard as I could on paper. Old paper. The archive room at work, with its smell of dust and cardboard and the faint vinegar note of degrading film. The Edo cookbook. The leather and dust of those endless shelves.
Sometimes I caught a glimpse. A flash of honey-colored wood in the dark behind my eyelids. A glint of brass. Once, so vividly that my fingers twitched on the blanket, I felt the warm, round weight of a door handle under my palm.
Then my newborn brain would simply switch off, without warning, and I'd be asleep mid-thought. Every single time.
It was maddening. All the knowledge in the world, and I couldn't stay conscious long enough to reach it. I had a grown man's mind in a body that slept twenty hours a day and had the attention span of a moth. I did the arithmetic once, lying there: four waking hours a day, most of them spent eating or crying, leaving perhaps twenty minutes of usable calm. Twenty minutes, and every one of them ending in sleep.
Patience, I told myself, over and over. You're an archivist. You've waited months for a single document to come back from restoration. You can wait for this.
But some nights, lying in the cradle listening to the leak in the next room tick into its bucket, the frustration built up in my chest until there was nowhere left for it to go. Because I was a baby, it usually came out as screaming, and then Berta would heave herself out of bed and walk me up and down the cold floor, humming, until I ran out of it.
The night it finally happened, I wasn't even trying.
I was about two months old. It had been a good day. The sun had come out for the first time in a week, and Berta had carried me outside and sat with me on an old bench in the overgrown back garden, under the bare branches of a dead apple tree. I lay in her lap with real warmth on my face for the first time in this world and watched the light come down through the branches in thin, moving lines. Something in my chest loosened, the way it used to every spring on my balcony.
That night I was warm and full. The fire had burned down to a low, steady crackle. Across the room Berta snored gently, a soft whistle at the end of every breath. Outside, the wind had dropped, and for once the loose windowpane was quiet.
I wasn't thinking about the Library at all. I was thinking about the garden. How wild it was, brambles and dead stalks and grass gone to seed. How much soil there must be under all of it, black and untouched. How, if someone cleared it, you could grow almost anything out there. Tomatoes, even.
And as I drifted toward sleep, thinking about tomatoes, I smelled it.
Not faintly. Not a memory. Strong and sudden and unmistakable, as if someone had just opened a cupboard full of old books right beside my head.
Old paper. Leather. Dust in sunlight.
Under my hand, my tiny hand curled on the blanket, I felt something warm, round, and smooth.
A brass door handle.
This time, I didn't fall asleep.
This time, I turned it.