I.34 Incident at the library

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Upon our return to St. Albert's I lost no time contact Sara and Mira via the ansible to inform them about what I had learned concerning the origin of the signet ring, and about the mysterious person Jake to whom it had been given by its original owner, Sir Colin Firth.

As it turned out, my Temporal Instructor and her grad student had news for me as well.

Running a distributed search on the Grid for newsworthy events that had happened on September 25, 1950 or a few weeks before that in the area of Greater London had yielded no results. Only when they had added the symbol of two crossed lilies as a correlated entity and considered the events of the entire year 1950, their efforts had proved successful.

"The two crossed lilies were the emblem of the East London Pendergast's Clinic and Children's Hospital," Mira who had done the research proudly told me. "On April 4, 1950,  a fire broke out at Pendergast's that completely destroyed the clinic. That event made it to the national news, that day. All the patients were saved, except for one small child, referred to as 'Infant 41'."

It was unclear if Infant 41 had actually become a victim of the fire. All that could be said was that the child had disappeared. The efforts to save people from the fire had been conducted in a somewhat uncoordinated if not chaotic manner, so it could not be ruled out that one of the rescuers or would-be rescuers had taken the baby and made off with it.

"So you think that Natty is Infant 41?" I marveled. "But that means you must know also where she came from, who her parents were and all that. Surely that must have been documented at the hospital."

"Unfortunately, it is not as easy as that," Sara cut in. "It turns out Infant 41 was a foundling, discovered on the front steps of the clinic only a few days before the fire. It made for a sad and mysterious story that occupied the tabloids for weeks after the event."

"Great Gauss! But what happened with the child between April 4 and September 25, then?"

"It is possible that she stayed with the young man who later delivered her to the orphanage. But we don't really know that, at this point."

We talked some more before we closed the connection. I walked back to my dorm room, lost in thought. It appeared that the more we found out about Natty and her origins, the more new questions came up.

If I needed any additional demonstration of the controversial role that Natty played at St. Albert's, my roommate herself provided such a demonstration on the very next day.

Our History teacher had divided our class into study groups of three girls each and had set each group a separate task. Those tasks involved researching certain aspects of the lives of ordinary people in various historical eras. Each group was supposed to give a presentation of their results in front of the class, a week from now.

In the 1960s, doing that sort of research meant visiting the local library – in our case, St. Albert's school library. Remember that in the 1960s not only did the Grid not yet exist, but also its predecessor, the World Wide Web, had not been set up yet, nor for that matter, any other service of the so-called Internet – a basic global network that, as you know, would be severely damaged if not completely destroyed during the Cataclysm only about a hundred years later.

So, off to the school library we went. Two girls of the Upper Sixth who were on library duty at that time were checking our credentials at the entrance. Their badges identified them as prefects. Their names were written on small cards placed in front of them on top of the counter: Marcia Evans and Clara Lang.

When it was Natty's turn to present her library card, Evans looked at it and shook her head.

"I am sorry, but I can't let you in."

"Why not?" Natty demanded.

"Because you are banned from the library", the other girl patiently explained. "It says here you are two months late to return a certain book you leased. As a consequence, you have been banned. Let me check which book it was." She consulted a file card. "The title of that book is, Differentiable Manifolds."

"But I needed that book for a longer time than just two weeks," Natty complained.

"In that case, what you ought to have done when the lease expired was to come here to extend the lease for another two weeks," Clara Lang told her.

"But I need to get into the library now, to do some research for school." Natty was almost shouting at this point.

"The ban can only be revoked when you return the book."

"But I don't have it with me."

"Then I suggest that you go to your dorm room and find the book."

Natty made a face. She shrugged, opened her bag and retrieved the book from inside it. "Alright. Here it is."

Evans glared at her.

"Here at the library, we do not like it when you fail to return borrowed books in time," she told her. "But we like it even less when we are being lied to."

Natty's cheeks had turned bright red. "I was not lying. I merely did not remember that the book was in my bag."

Evans took the book from her. "Be that as it may. You returned the book, two months late." She reached down to retrieve a short cane from underneath the counter.  "That would be three strokes, then." She turned  towards Lang. "Right, Clara?" The other girl nodded.

Natty looked mutinous. "Why three strokes rather than two?"

"One for each month you failed to return that book and an additional one for impertinence." Evans stepped around the counter to confront my roommate. "Come on, let's go."

Dorothy Barnett and her cronies were smirking as Evans led a fuming Natty into a small adjoining room. Though there was no door we could not see what was happening in there as Natty and Evans had moved out of our line of sight.

However, they could be overheard well enough.

"Bend over, Fogg," the prefect girl ordered.

A moment later, we could hear the whistle as the cane cut through he air, followed by a small sound as it made contact, and a gasp.

Natty muttered something unintelligible.

Another whistle, this time followed by a yelp. There was a pause.

"Get back in position," Evans demanded.

For the third time, we heard that dreadful whistling sound, followed by what sounded like a stifled sob.

A few seconds later, Marcia Evans and Natty reappeared. Natty was red-faced and looking sullen.

"I would like to borrow that book again, now," she demanded.

"Unfortunately, that won't be possible," Evans told her.

"Why not? I am no longer banned, am I?"

"No, you are not banned from the library anymore. But due to your failure to return the book in time, you will have to wait three more weeks until you can borrow that particular book again."

"But I need that book," Natty insisted.

Evans merely shrugged.

"I would like to borrow that book, if I may," I said.

"I don't see why not." Evans took a file card and wrote on it. "What was your name again?"

"It's Hart. Catherine Hart."

"As in Fogg and Hart, roommates," Dorothy Barnett casually remarked, with heavy emphasis on the word 'roommates'.

Natty turned around and stepped on Barnett's right foot, hard. The other girl yelled.

"I beg your pardon?" Evans looked up distractedly.

"Could we please move on to allow all of us access to the library now," Jen Turner cut in.

"Yes, we have been waiting here like, for ten minutes already," her sister added.

"Right." Evans handed me the textbook and waved for Natty and me to enter the library.

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