The Bookbinder

Trafford Publishing

Chapter One

Leading from the dirt road by which Ryl reached her house was a flagstone walkway, along which she had planted box hedges on either side. She had put them in five years before, when she had moved from Connecticut to the North Carolina farm. The slow-growing box was still sparse, only about ten inches high, but Ryl had considered her good genes when she was planning her garden and thought that the hedge might reach over her head by the time they carried her out feet first. Beyond the box, up the warm stone steps and on the edge of the wooden porch so that they could receive sunlight in the afternoon was the large, round tub of pansies which Ryl kept watered and fertilized so that they bloomed from spring to fall. She preferred the longer-stemmed, lighter varieties of pansy to the large, more common purple and gold ones, and certainly they seemed to last longer than the big ones. Her mother, Nella Ambrose, had told Ryl that it was entirely her imagination, that she herself had equally good luck with the big pansies she grew in her flower garden by her own house further down the road. But Ryl went to the nursery each year and looked for the same delicate white and lavender flowers she found so endearing.

Since the house belonged to a farm which had been worked for generations, it was not surprising to find an old-fashioned screen door, then a heavy plank door, painted forest green, leading into the house. On either side of these doors were long, low windows, with shutters painted the same green as the doors. Inside, however, the house had been much modernized, especially the kitchen, which one could glimpse at the far end of the dining room to the right of the foyer. To the left was a small living room with a grey rock fireplace and mantel and comfortable furniture upholstered in a deep red, which suited the Persian carpets on the varnished wood floor and went well with the pine walls. Beyond this was a morning room where Ryl liked to sit reading on days too cold or rainy to go out; this room was all done in bright yellows and white. Her Peace roses looked particularly fine there, she thought, grouped together in a very special crystal vase on a white wicker table.

In the dining room the theme of red upholstery and natural wood had been carried out, the table and chairs being of a fine cherry with red damask cushions. There was also a breakfront, but instead of containing Ryl's china and crystal, which were stored in the much-remodeled kitchen, it contained her small but significant collection of the most ancient of books. There were Assyrian and Babylonian clay cylinders and tablets with cuneiform characters formed with wooden styluses, their subjects being exchanges of land, wills, historical events, even stories. There were Roman clay tablets and papyrus rolls, then a small collection of codices of the medieval Christian era, the earliest of the books bound in a way that would be familiar to the modern reader.

Ryl had inherited some of her collection from her father, Dr. Arthur Ambrose, a professor of classics at Princeton University until his death of throat cancer at sixty-seven, the result of a lifelong attachment to his pipe. Other items she had dickered for by mail, on the internet, or at rare book conventions and sales. She frequently attended such events in the United States and Europe in order to build up her own business of trading in rare books and her craft of bookbinding, which she pursued in the old red barn not far from the back door.

To reach this one passed through a gleaming modern kitchen, its counters topped with a green granite, down a few wooden steps, to a stone walkway which led to the front of the barn in which Ryl did most of her work. Since the farm had for most of its existence been a fully working one, meant to support a family, there had been pigs and dairy cattle whose stalls Ryl had converted with wooden flooring, shelves, and tables and desks where needed. Her computer, over which much of her business was done, was located in a particularly large stall which must have been used for birthing, and the upper floor of the barn, which of course had been used for hay and feed for the animals, was used for Ryl's scant storage purposes. Ryl was tall, nearly six feet, a lean and fit 35 years old, and so had built shelves up to the high ceilings of the stalls on the first floor with little consideration of what she could easily reach. Should she require something set too high, there was a stepladder in the barn.

Today, which was a Tuesday during the busy summer tourist season in the mountains, Ryl had dressed comfortably in a well-worn blue chambray shirt and jeans for work at home, instead of the dressier skirts and blouses she wore when she went up the mountain to work at her mother's bookstore. Nella and her friend Rose Bryant ran a little roadside shop, called The High Country Reader, and Ryl helped them out on Mondays, Wednesdays, and the very busy summer Saturdays, when house owners, as the mountaineers called them, came up from Atlanta and other surrounding cities and towns to enjoy a weekend or summer vacation at their second homes. Her other working days were spent in the garden or the barn, busy with her bookbinding presses and tools, choosing from and working with the fine leathers, papers, and cloths carefully laid out, hanging, or put away in large shallow drawers in a big stall done over and dedicated to them.

But on this particular morning Ryl, her long straight black hair tied back for comfort, stood looking at a neat pile of crates which contained her share of the furnishings of the English Cloyne family, from which she was indirectly descended. There were four of the big wooden trunk-shaped boxes, and they were filled solid, had made no jostling sounds when the two men who had arrived with them earlier had unloaded them from a large white moving van. The van had not had a name on it, but Ryl knew that one had been engaged by an attorney in New York to distribute across the United States some remnants of the Cloyne belongings which had been left after the sale of the Welsh estate. Its arrival that morning was not unexpected.

The Cloynes had been a family of solid English yeomen until the seventeenth century, when Robert Cloyne, later Sir Robert, had made a success of a textile and dyeing business, then married a wealthy woman from York. With that money he had invested well in London rental properties of the best quality, and had added farms and manor houses at more remote spots around England and Wales. Later heads of the expanding family had served as good stewards of the property until the late nineteenth century,...