Page 19 of A Theory of Dreaming
“Now then, are there any questions?”
Effy’s arm sprang up.
Several other students raised their hands, and Tinmew cast his gaze lazily over the crowd. When he spotted her, something flickered in his dull brown eyes—an indulgent sort of curiosity, though Effy supposed it was better than contempt.
“Yes,” he said. “Miss Sayre?”
Effy cleared her throat. Though she looked determinedly ahead, at Professor Tinmew and nothing else, she could feel the stares of the other students on her, raking her like invisible claws. She winced, but managed to keep her voice even as she spoke.
“I had a question about the formatting of the text,” she said. “If you look, beginning on page two and continuing on for the duration of the poem, there are several words on each page that are printed in bold and capitalized. Obviously, since form was so important to Ardor, I wanted to know, what is the significance of the bolded words?”
One of Professor Tinmew’s thin brows arched. There was the sound of shuffling paper as the other students flicked through the pages of their books. After a moment, during which Tinmew seemed barely to be thinking at all, he at last replied.
“Traditionally, one would expect that the bolding and capitalization of text is meant to emphasize the bolded and capitalized words.” His voice had a bored sort of tone; there were several low snickers in the crowd.
“But,” Effy said, “why emphasizethesewords? They seem chosen at random—”
“Nothingin Ardor’s work is arbitrary, or, as you put it, ‘chosen atrandom,’” Tinmew cut in sharply. “The visual element of the words, the way they appear on the page, is of utmost significance. If you look at this first word,please, on page two, you can see that when it is capitalized, the arch of the letterPhas a more domineering appearance, emphasizing the totality of the curse’s power, which has turned the garden into stone, whereas theL, when capitalized, has a right angle, emphasizing the rigidity of the maiden’s captive state, the unchanging nature of the cursed garden...”
And so Tinmew went on, explaining how each of the letters highlighted some difficult-to-perceive quality of the text. Effy looked down at her book and frowned. She traced the letterPwith the tip of her finger, trying to internalize Tinmew’s analysis. Yet by the time the bell rang, Effy still found herself unsatisfied. She shoved her materials into her satchel, shrugged on her coat, and walked briskly out of the literature college, back into the unyielding cold.
The ink on her left palm had faded with washing, but the word was still—just barely—discernible.Rockflower.After taking a sweep of the area, checking for reporters cached within the crowd or lurking behind pillars, Effy turned and marched with determination toward the library.
Invigorated by this purpose, Effy climbed the steps to the second floor of the library and walked right up to the circulation desk. As she breathed in the scent of old paper and watched the dust motes float through shafts of honey-hued light, her mind was invaded with a memory. Months ago she had been standing in precisely thissame place, her body abuzz with nervousness, her heart pounding with a somatic, almost thoughtless terror. She remembered the boy who had approached her, who had inked his number on her hand.
As the student ahead of her in the line thanked the librarian and left, Effy stepped forward, drawing in a breath.That was then, she thought firmly.This is now.The writing on her palm was her own. The fear she felt was an ancient thing, a relic dredged from its sunken tomb. At least, this was what she tried to convince herself of as she greeted the librarian with a shaky smile.
“Good morning,” she said. “I’m looking for some books by Rockflower—Francis Rockflower. Do you have them in?”
Without greeting her in return, the librarian began to page through her enormous ledger book. “Is it his biography of Laurence Ardor that you’re interested in?”
“Yes.”
The librarian peeled off a scrap of paper from a small notepad and scrawled down a series of numbers. “This is where you’ll find it in the stacks. We should have several copies.”
“Wonderful,” Effy said. Her heart skipped, enlivened by this small victory. “Thank you.”
This had gone far, far better than her last trip to the circulation desk, when she had tried to research Myrddin, only to find that all the books on him had been checked out by some dastardlyP. Héloury. As she made her way through the shadowy, labyrinthine stacks, the memory occurred to her with a sheepish sort of joy. The past she carried with her did not have to be a heavy thing. And when she needed to rest, she could put it down.
Following the librarian’s instructions, Effy found the book easily.A Complete Biography of Laurence Ardor, Lord of Landevale, by Dr. Francis A. Rockflower.
It was more worn than she expected—its lavender clothbound cover whitening in places and bent at the corners—and also longer. In the shuddery, inconstant light of the stacks, it was impossible to read anything lengthy without straining her eyes. So Effy took the book off the shelf, returned to the circulation desk, and checked it out.
Then, with a spike of adrenaline, Effy did something she had never done before in all her time at the university: she went into one of the library’s large reading rooms.
Until now, she had been far too intimidated to enter them. She had preferred to hide herself away in one of the small, cramped rooms on the library’s upper floors, cached against one of the windows, where she was unlikely to encounter another student. These reading rooms, with their high vaulted ceilings, their long mahogany tables, and their overstuffed leather armchairs, with the busts of great authors and artists resting on marble plinths at the end of each aisle, felt like a world she was not permitted to enter. It had not helped, of course, that these rooms were always nearly overcrowded with students, all jockeying for the limited seats, and often hostile in their single-minded focus on essays or sketches or song compositions.
But it was different now. Effy was a literature student; she had helped to author a groundbreaking thesis, and she belonged here, just as much as anyone else. She had a scholarly inquiry, and a purpose. So, carrying Rockflower’s book against her chest, she sat down at one of the long tables. The student to her right, wearing the sable and whiteof the history college, did not do so much as glance up, absorbed in his own reading. The student to her left, wearing the music college’s violet, cast her a brief look, appearing more irritable at the interruption than anything, and then returned to his reading as well.
Effy opened the biography and took her notebook out of her satchel. She had thrown out her architecture college–issued journals, with their red covers and stag head embossing, and though she was supposed to have been given green-and-gold literature college journals, they had not yet arrived. This notebook was one she had purchased in Laleston, while she and Preston had stayed in the hotel writing their thesis. Its navy-blue cover was agnostic, neutral—yet it set her apart from her peers, who were all working from their college-issued journals.
Shaking off this worry, and flipping to the section of Ardor’s biography titled “Marriage and Family,” Effy at last set to reading.
There is arguably no force more significant in Laurence Ardor’s life than love, be it romantic or familial; whether for his wife, Claribel Ardor, or for the mysterious “Lady A,” to whom many of Ardor’s later works are addressed. Indeed, Ardor even wrote reverently of his father-in-law, the 1st Baron Landevale, to whom he owed a great debt—not only the transfer of his title and peerage but the latter years of his informal education, at the hands of the baron’s private tutors. Laurence Ardor’s corpus could be said to be one magnificent and encompassing “letter of love” to those around him; or even an ode to the act of loving itself, in all of its forms. A romantic and a Romantic, Ardor’s passionate manner ofliving is echoed in his poetry.
Yet, just as much as Ardor’s life is marked by love, it is also marked by nearly unfathomable loss. When Ardor was twenty-eight, his father-in-law, the baron, passed away due to a swift and unexpected fever. Seven years later, his wife, Claribel, died in the same manner, leaving Ardor to raise his daughter and only child, Antonia, alone. Only two years after that, another fever struck Ardor himself, and while he survived, he was weakened, bedridden, and blind. It is in this condition that he—astonishingly—composed his magnum opus, “The Garden in Stone.”
Effy’s heart raced with this discovery as she clattered down the steps of the library, Rockflower’s biography tucked into her satchel and her notebook brimming with hastily scrawled notes. She had found something, which was not exactly hidden, but which had been kept from her; something that, if she had followed the rote instructions of Professor Tinmew, she would have never happened upon at all.
