The Poe Baxter Books Series Box Set - volume 1

Chapter 1-2

I squealed in delight, startling BB to an upright position, from which he stared at me with the kind of scorn only a hamster can muster. I didn’t care. Afternoon tea in a castle. I couldn’t wait.

The flight was pretty mundane except for the excellent coffee and the three small children who, despite BB’s best imitation of a corpse, somehow figured out he was on the plane and made visits every half-hour or so to say hello. For his part, my pet acted the put-out diva quite well, but I could tell, as only I could, that he was secretly pleased with his new fan club. His tiny tail was puffed up quite a bit by the time we landed.

The children had been a delight, but as we got our bags and found a taxi to take us to the B&B Beattie had raved about on the flight, I felt myself growing fatigued. I hadn’t ever really been one for all-nighters, and now, at forty-seven, my body was definitely in opposition to them. And I knew that adjusting to the time difference after our overnight flight would be best achieved by staying awake all day.

Still, we had tea at the castle to look forward to, and if I knew Beattie, and I definitely knew Beattie, we’d be starting work right away. Fortunately, my best friend also had a hearty appetite, so she had pre-arranged a full English breakfast—I made a mental note to ask if there was such thing as a Scottish equivalent—upon our arrival at the B&B. Never had I been so glad to see a sausage—a banger, I was corrected by my companion—as I was at that moment. The coffee on the plane had been wonderful. The rest of the food was sadly typical for air travel.

Breakfast in our tummies, our bags in our rooms, and our hostess cooing over Butterball in the front parlor, we set off to our first meeting of the day. As we walked toward the center of town and the National Library of Scotland, Beattie finally deemed me ready to hear our work itinerary. Apparently, our vacation one was still top secret, to my continued annoyance.

“The foremost expert in Scottish folklore is meeting us today at 1:30. He has some insights about the book we’re looking to procure from our meeting on Monday.” She looked at me out of the corner of her eye. “Plus, he is single, as best I can tell, and quite your type.” I tried not to look a little pleased, but given that my best friend knew just how abominable my dating experience had been in the past three years, I knew she wouldn’t buy it if I tried to play it totally cool about an attractive, bookish man.

The“Oh yeah?” I said with a strained attempt at casualness. “He’s not your type?”

“Nope, not a beard or tattoo in sight.” She grimaced. “Too uptight and brainy for me. So that means just perfect for you.”

I could have argued, but she wasn’t wrong. “So he knows about the Sea Monster Chronicles, then.” I had spent a fair bit of my time in the past two days looking up the various sea monster tales of Scotland and had been delighted to learn that they were thought to be a kind of dragon by some. Even old Nessie had some stories that linked her to fire breath. The laws of nature caused me to struggle with the idea of underwater animals breathing fire, but then again, I didn’t understand how fish glowed in the dark, either, so I couldn’t question much.

Sea Monster ChroniclesBeattie nodded. “He’s done a fair amount of study about the lore, and while he has moved far past the point of believing in such animals, he does know a great deal about the people who created the legends. He told Fitz that this was the most extensive collection of medieval tales he’d ever come across and even hinted that he hoped the National Library might buy it.”

I winced. “Oh no.” I was suddenly even more nervous. “I don’t want to be poaching national treasures from anyone, least of all a hot librarian.”

Beattie shook her head. “Fitz made it clear that we were procuring the book for a Scottish patron who wanted to donate the book to the Library in honor of his father, a well-regarded Scottish paleontologist.”

I sighed. “So the Library will get the book but not have to buy it.”

“Exactly,” Beattie said with a grin. “Your uncle is famous in this industry for a reason.”

She wasn’t wrong. Uncle Fitz got commissions to find books all over the world, mostly for wealthy book collectors who wanted to add to their private libraries. But he was very discriminating in his choice of clients, so I should have known he would never be involved in anything that would be regarded as foul play by anyone in the business.

Uncle Fitz had two rules:

1.Books belong, when possible, to the public in some form.

2.Books should stay in their home country as much as possible.

I knew he occasionally broke these rules when necessary, say when a book was in danger of being destroyed or lost and the only safe home he could find for it was in a country not of its origin. But by and large, he was devoutly faithful to his policies. It was one reason I was eager to work with him.

As we approached the Library, I squashed the little bit of disappointment I felt at seeing the building. I’d been hoping for Scottish architecture with spires and arches, but instead, the building looked remarkably like the classic Greek architecture on which buildings in our own nation’s capital had been fashioned. All clean lines and bare sandstone.

When we went inside, however, all my disappointment faded away as I looked at the illuminated manuscripts displayed in glass cases in the lobby. Each swirl and icon on the pages was hand-drawn, and I could have stayed to try to decipher the text all day.

But fortunately, or unfortunately, as the case may be, my fascination with the manuscripts before me was interrupted when a very handsome, delightfully nerdy man in tweed and horn-rimmed glasses asked if I was Poe Baxter.

I stammered for a minute as I looked at him, and Beattie had to answer for me. “Yes, this Poe. I’m Beattie. Thank you for seeing us, Mr. Anderson.”

“Adaire, please. Nice to meet you both,” Adaire said in an accent that was definitely Scottish but also not quite the brogue I expected from my extensive experience with Scottish dialect derived exclusively from watching Outlander.

Outlander.I finally put out my hand to shake his and pulled my face into a smile that I hoped seemed friendly and not like a creepy American stalker person. “Yes, thank you for seeing us.”

“Are you a scholar of illuminated manuscripts as well as folklore, Ms. Baxter?” he asked as he pointed at the glass case I had been staring at.

I blushed. He had called me a scholar, a title I was never afforded as a community college professor, I was flattered but shook my head. “Far from it. I find the art to be fascinating, though, and the little I know about the practice of creating the illuminations is intriguing, too. Although I’ll admit, I learned most of that from Umberto Eco.”

“Ah, The Name of the Rose,” he said with a smile. “An excellent mystery.” He blushed a little when he met my gaze. “Would you like more time here?” He glanced from me to Beattie.

The Name of the RoseI shook my head as I looked at my best friend, who had a knowing grin on her face that made me kind of want to punch her in the arm. “We can always come back. We want to respect your time.” I smiled at him. “Plus, I’m so eager to see what you have to share.”

He nodded, and Beattie and I trailed behind him as he took us to the back of the lobby and led us through an arched, wooden door. I was a sucker for a secret passageway, and this entrance very much felt like it could be one.

Unfortunately, that illusion dissolved a bit when the doorway opened onto a very typical corridor with doors on each side. What wasn’t typical, however, was that the walls were covered in famous paintings, including a study for Da Vinci’s Virgin of the Rocks, one of my favorite paintings of all time. Without thinking, I stopped cold and stared at the woman’s face and felt tears prick the back of my eyes.

Virgin of the RocksBeattie stepped beside me and smiled. “She looks so wise and a bit tired.”

I sighed. “Yes, it’s why I love the final painting. Da Vinci seemed to understand the weariness that comes from motherhood, even for the Virgin Mary.”

Adaire turned back to us. “We hang some of the pieces that the National Gallery can’t display.” He gestured around the walls. “Everything is climate-controlled here, so it’s a good place for them. Plus, at least some people get to enjoy them instead of them living in storage for years at a time.”

“It is a sort of aesthetic tragedy that so much great art sits in back rooms,” Beattie said as we began to walk again. “Maybe we could take over a few superstores and turn them into museums.”

That was a good idea, in my opinion, but I didn’t have much time to think about it because Adaire led us through another door on the right side of the hall. The allure of magic was around us again as we stepped into the wood-walled office. The walls were lined with bookshelves full of titles, and the large wooden desk was clear and polished, with just a laptop on it. The space seemed the opposite of my uncle’s store, but somehow, it felt just as vibrant, just as full of stories and their people.

As he took a seat behind his desk, he pointed to two wing-backed chairs in front of him, and Beattie and I sat down. The chairs were immensely comfortable, and I felt even more at home in this space as I noticed a small toy rabbit on the corner of a shelf behind Adaire’s head. A man who could display a stuffed animal amongst all this heady, bookish stuff was my kind of man. I blushed at my own thoughts.

“Well, let’s begin here,” Adaire said as he pulled a slim folder from the shelf behind him. “This is the provenance, as best we can tell, for the book you are hoping to acquire.” He spun the folder in my direction and slid it across the desk to me.

I leaned forward, opened the file, and stared at the image of the book at the top of the page. Definitely the same book. As I began to read, I found my pulse quickening. Apparently, the book had been handmade in Inverness in 1340 by a man named Angus Duncan. Duncan operated a small book bindery that supplied tomes to the clan chiefs of Scotland. Each book was one of a kind, the paper in front of me said, and each was immensely valuable because of its age and craftsmanship.

“The book contains all the seanchas about water monsters known at the time,” I read. “Seanchas?” I asked Adaire. “Related to séances?”