Where else to begin my research but at home, in the shop? I was fasated by the old almanacs. Since I was a child, any moment of boredom or ay or fear would seo these shelves to flick through the pages of names and dates and annotations. Between these covers, past lives were summarized in a few brutally ral lines. It was a world where men were baros and bishops and ministers of parliament, and women were wives and daughters. There was nothing to tell you whether these men liked kidneys for breakfast, nothing to tell you whom they loved or what form their fear gave to the shapes in the dark after they blew the dle out at night. There was nothing personal at all. What was it, then, that moved me so in these sparse annotations of the lives of dead men? Only that they were men, that they had lived, that now they were dead.
Reading them, I felt a stirring in me. In me, but not of me. Reading the lists, the part of me that was already oher side woke and caressed me.
I never explaio anyone why the almanacs meant so mue; I never even said I liked them. But my father took note of my preference, and whenever volumes of the sort came up at au, he made sure to get them. And so it was that all the illustrious dead of the try, going back many geions, were spending their afterlife tranquilly on the shelves of our sed floor. With me for pany.
It was on the sed floor, crouched in the window seat, that I turhe pages of names. I had found Miss Winter’s grandfather Gee Angelfield. He was not a baro, nor a minister, nor a bishop, but still, here he was. The family had aristocratic ins—there had once been a title, but a few geions earlier there had been a split in the family: the title had gone one way, the money and the property another. He was on the property side. The almanacs teo follow the titles, but still, the e was close enough to merit ary, so here he was: Angelfield, Gee; his date of birth; residing at Angelfield House in Oxfordshire; married to Mathilde Monnier of Reims, France; one son, Charles. Trag him through the almanacs for later years, I found an ame a decade later: one son, Charles; one daughter, Isabelle. After a little more page-turning, I found firmation of Gee Angelfield’s death and, by looking her up under March, Roland, Isabelle’s marriage.
For a moment it amused me to think that I had gone all the way to Yorkshire to hear Miss Winter’s story, when all the time it was here, in the almanacs, a few feet under my bed. But then I started thinking properly. What did it prove, this paper trail? Only that such people as Gee and Mathilde and their children, Charles and Isabelle, existed. There was nothing to say that Miss Winter had not found them the same way I had, by flig through a book. These almanacs could be found in libraries all over the place. Anyone who wanted could look through them. Might she not have found a set of names and dates and embroidered a story around them to eain herself?
Alongside these misgivings I had another problem. Roland March had died, and with his death the paper trail for Isabelle came to an end. The world of the almanac was a queer one. In the real world, families branched like trees, blood mixed by marriage passed from one geion to the , making an ever-wider of es. Titles, oher hand, passed from one man to one man, and it was this narrow, linear progression that the almanac liked to highlight. On each side of the title line were a few younger brothers, nephews, cousins, wh
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