“That’s it. He said something about loving books more than his mother.”
Dawes’s lips softened in a smile. “It’s an Egyptian proverb. Suits him well.”
Egyptian. Alex sat up straighter, her feet sliding from the pillow.
Dawes yelped. “Please don’t get that on the rug!”
“When the books didn’t burn, he said stories were immutable.” “So?”
Dawes asked, bustling into the kitchen for a towel.
Alex remembered walking beneath the entry to Sterling with Darlington.
There were four stone scribes over the entrance. One of them was Egyptian.
“When was Sterling Library built?”
“1931, I think?” Dawes said from the kitchen. “People really hated it at the time. I think the term used was cathedral orgy. They said it looked too much like…” Dawes halted in the doorway, wet towel in her hands. “They said it looked like a church.”
“Hallowed ground.”
She and Dawes had taken what long-dead Bunchy said too literally.
They’d been looking in the wrong places.
Dawes drifted slowly back into the parlor, the towel still dripping in her hands. “John Sterling donated the money for the library.” She sat down. “He was in Skull and Bones.”
“That doesn’t mean much,” Alex said cautiously. “There are a lot of rich guys in Skull and Bones.”
Dawes nodded, still slow, as if she were underwater. “The architect died suddenly and someone else had to take over.” Alex waited.
“James Gamble Rogers took the job. He was in Scroll and Key. Punter is another word for a gambler.”
Johnny and Punter’s friends built a Gauntlet. On hallowed ground.
Dawes was clutching the towel with both hands now, as if it were a microphone she was about to sing into. “Would that I might make thee love books more than thy mother. That quote is above the entry, above the scribe.
It’s written in hieroglyphs.”
Stories were immutable. And what was a library but a house full of stories?
“It’s Sterling,” Alex said. “The library is the portal to hell.”
Erected in memory of
JOHN WILLIAM STERLING
BORN 12 MAY 1844
DIED 5 JULY 1918
B.A. 1864: M.A. 1874
LL.D. 1893: LAWYER
LOYAL FRIEND
TRUSTED ADVISER
AGGRESSIVE LEADER
DEVOTED ALUMNUS
James Gamble Rogers Architect
—Memorial inscription, entrance to Sterling Memorial Library
If I must be a prisoner I would desire to have no other prison than thatlibrary.
—James I, engraved above the entrance to the exhibition
corridor of Sterling Memorial Library
11
Alex had every intention of helping Dawes research, but the next thing she knew she was waking up in the parlor at Il Bastone, morning light drifting through the windows. A copy of the 1931 Yale Gazette article detailing Sterling’s decoration rested open on her chest as though she’d tried to use the book to tuck herself in.
She felt warm and easy, as if she’d imagined everything at Black Elm, and this morning could just be simple, an ordinary Sunday. She touched her hand to the floorboards and they seemed to hum.
