She walks home through the Cambridge dusk, past the floodlit spire of King’s College, past the river where students in punts laugh at nothing. In her small flat, she makes toast and marmalade—she has long since given up on proper dinners when deep in a manuscript—and opens her notebook to the Hasty Brother. She writes, in her own careful, legible, utterly unremarkable hand:
The fellow hesitates. “Not yet.”
Yes, she thinks. It was. Because here is the secret that non-palaeographists will never understand: this is not a dry antiquarian puzzle. It is an act of resurrection. The Hasty Brother died in 1257, probably of a pestilence, buried in an unmarked grave somewhere under what is now a sheep pasture. No portrait of him exists. No chronicle mentions his name. But Lena has just held his hand. She has seen him hesitate over that symbol in 1253, dipping his quill twice because the first stroke went awry. She has felt his quiet pride in inventing a faster way to write our . She knows he was trained at Fountains—a more prestigious house—and then relegated to the daughter abbey at Calder. Was that a punishment? A promotion? She will never know. But she knows he took his Fountains habits with him, like a stone in his shoe, and they surfaced in this single, bizarre, beautiful ligature. palaeographist