The Footnote Incident at The High Archive of Thornvale

An Official Record of Accounts

(I drew this onto a linocut, then carved it out and printed it on various handmade papers, and then hand-painted each one. - Chaiga T. Cheska)
~~~

(Barnaby’s Waltz - written and created by Chaiga T. Cheska, using Suno)

Compiled by Bramwell Corin, Assistant Librarian,
with contributions from Thaddeus Inkblot and Pip Thimble, on loan from the Wandering Library, at the request of the High Archive of Thornvale.
~~~

Recovered from the lecture notes of Professor Dunvaris Thornvale, Chair of Comparative Annotation, High Archive of Thornvale, found abandoned upon the lectern in the Hall of Bellinger following the events described below.

“...and it is precisely this quality, ladies and gentlemen, this capacity of the marginal note to contain within itself an entire second argument, subordinate in position yet sovereign in ambition, that I wish this afternoon to press upon you with some force, for it has long been my conviction that the footnote is not the servant of the sentence¹ but its shadow self, patient, watchful, waiting only for sufficient density of citation² to assert an authority the main text never granted it, and it is this very principle, expanded, elaborated, and, I will confess, rather further elaborated than I had originally intended³, that I now propose to demonstrate before you, for⁴”

[The lecture, and the lecturer, end here.]

¹ On which point, see my earlier remarks regarding the tyranny of the primary clause, a tyranny I have elsewhere characterised, at some length, as unjust.
² See above.
³ See above, again, though rather further along.
⁴ [No further text was found.]
~~~

I. In Which We Are Not Invited to Tea

Bramwell’s Log

Mistress Spine called the three of us into her office at nine o’clock on a Wednesday morning, which even Pip, who does not as a rule notice omens, remarked afterwards had felt significant before anyone had said a word. Dame Pellifrax was present too, seated in the good chair, which she does not generally trouble herself to use, and the two of them had between them the settled composure of women who had already decided a matter and were merely informing the rest of us of its outcome.

“The High Archive of Thornvale has written requesting assistance,” Mistress Spine said, “locating a member of their scholarly staff who has gone missing under circumstances they describe as delicate. You three will go.”

I asked, reasonably I thought, why three, and why us specifically, and Dame Pellifrax answered before Mistress Spine could, with the brisk cheer of someone delivering good news to people who have not yet worked out that it is not good news at all.

“Because the Library is receiving guests this afternoon,” she said, “and it is a great deal easier to receive guests without three male staff members underfoot.”

I understood, somewhat belatedly, that this applied even to Thaddeus, who has never in his professional life been underfoot anywhere and takes some quiet pride in it.

“What sort of guests,” Pip asked, in the tone of someone who suspects he already knows and is hoping to be wrong.

“A tea party,” said Mistress Spine, with the flat finality of a woman who considers the subject to require no further elaboration. “Ladies only.”

There followed a silence of the kind that generally precedes Pip saying something he will later regret having said within earshot of his employer. He managed, on this occasion, only “Oh,” delivered with a wounded dignity out of proportion to the size of the boy producing it, and I confess I felt something of the same sentiment myself, though I had the professional discretion not to voice it. Dame Pellifrax does an excellent seed cake. I suspected this seed cake would be in attendance without me, which I found rather tragic.

Thaddeus wrote nothing on the subject, which I took, correctly as it turned out, to mean he had already resigned himself to the day ahead and saw no purpose in recording his feelings about a tea party he had never seriously expected to attend.

We left within the hour. Thaddeus carried a coil of rope, on Mistress Spine’s specific instruction, though none of us at that point knew what for.

II. The Steps of the High Archive

Bramwell’s Log, continued

The High Archive of Thornvale sits into the cliff face at the northern edge of the town of the same name, and even from the approaching road it has the settled, watchful quality of a structure that has been thinking for several centuries and has not yet finished.

We had expected, I think all three of us, some manner of formal reception. A porter, perhaps. A letter of welcome. What we received instead, the moment we set foot upon the lowest of the front steps, was seven scholars descending upon us at a run, all talking at once, and a woman at their head who introduced herself, without pausing for breath, as Professor Wendy Ashcombe, Head of the Department of Comparative Annotation, and informed us in the same sentence that Dunvaris Thornvale had vanished from the Hall of Bellinger the previous evening, mid-lecture, and that we were needed immediately, this instant, no time could be spared for the formality of going inside first.

I said that going inside first seemed a reasonable place to begin, nonetheless. Professor Ashcombe did not appear to hear me.

What followed, over some twenty minutes upon those front steps, in a morning already warming toward the sort of midsummer heat that would have every one of us regretting our attire by midday, was an account of Professor Thornvale’s disappearance delivered by no fewer than four people at once, each convinced their version was the more accurate, none of them agreeing on anything specific.

The essential facts, as I eventually established them, are these: Professor Thornvale, Chair of Comparative Annotation and great-great-great-great-grandson of one of this Archive’s founding scholars, had been delivering a lecture on the theory of the marginal note, a subject upon which he holds, or held, strong and frequently expressed views. He had, in the course of that lecture, made what several witnesses independently described as rather too much use of footnotes, nesting one within another with an enthusiasm his colleagues characterised, variously, as customary, concerning, and exactly what had been apparently warned against by the committee in 1764. At some point in the fourth or possibly fifth nested reference, and here the accounts diverge meaningfully, Professor Thornvale simply ceased to be present. Ceased, mid-sentence, the words continuing to hang in the air for a moment, several witnesses agreed, before these words themselves followed him wherever he had gone.

“He is still there,” said a small, urgent man at the back, whom I never did get a name for. “I am certain of it. We need only find the correct citation to draw him back out.”

“He is not there,” said a second scholar, with the weary patience of someone who has had this argument several times already that morning. “There is nowhere for him to be, Peter. That is rather the point.”

“He is there,” said the first scholar again, to no one, and wrote something down on the back of his hand.

I would like the record to reflect that I attempted, on several occasions, to ask a direct question and receive a direct answer, and that I was unsuccessful every time.

It was during this exchange that Thaddeus began, without any announcement, to stick footnotes to the side of my face.

I did not notice the first one. The second I felt but chose to ignore, on the grounds that seven agitated scholars had just informed me their colleague had disappeared into the theoretical apparatus of academic citation, and this did not strike me as the moment to address a colleague’s stationery habits. By the fourth, adhered somewhere in the region of my left ear, I had become aware that Pip, standing at my other shoulder, had gone very quiet in the way he goes quiet when he is trying not to laugh and not managing it.

I did not look at him. I kept my attention upon Professor Ashcombe, who was by then explaining a third and contradictory theory involving the correct pronunciation of citations, and I maintained, I believe, a reasonably professional bearing throughout, despite an itching sensation spreading slowly across the left side of my face that I was not, under the circumstances, at liberty to address.

I have since read what Thaddeus stuck to me that morning. I record them here for completeness, and because I believe posterity is owed the full picture.

Note the first, upon my cheek: You are being extremely patient.
Note the second, upon my jaw: This is not a compliment. I am documenting it.
Note the third, upon my ear: She has now contradicted herself twice.
Note the fourth, upon my shoulder, considerably larger than the others: I believe we are going to need a search party.

It was, I will admit, Thaddeus who reached this conclusion before I did, though I take some professional comfort in having reached it independently only moments later, and in having been the one to say it out loud.

“We will need a search party,” I said.

Professor Ashcombe looked at me as though I had personally solved the entire matter through force of intellect alone, which I had not, and went at once to organise one.

III. The Search Party

Pip’s Account

I did NOT want to be there, and I want that on the record before anything else gets written down, because I have a horrible feeling nobody’s going to properly appreciate how unfair the whole morning was otherwise! Mistress Spine and Dame Pellifrax were, at that exact moment, sitting down to an actual tea party with an actual cake, and I was standing on some strange archive’s front lawn watching seven scholars assemble something they kept calling an “expedition,” which is a very grand word for what actually turned up.

Two scholars arrived carrying, between them, no fewer than SIX pairs of long woolly socks, which they held with the kind of solemn care you’d expect for a sacred relic, not knee-high knitwear! I asked what the socks were for. Neither of them answered me, though one gave the other a look I definitely wasn’t meant to see, and I wrote “socks: purpose unclear, morale worryingly high” in my notebook and left it there because honestly, what else was I supposed to do with that?!

Then there was a small, stooped man called Prosper Wrick who kept a hand mirror on a chain round his neck, and every thirty seconds or so he’d glance into it, then whip around to look behind himself, then relax like everything was fine, and then do the whole thing again! I counted ELEVEN times before I made myself stop, purely for my own peace of mind.

And THEN an older scholar turned up with a biscuit tin he would not share, not with me, not with anyone, hugging it to his chest right through Professor Ashcombe’s third recap of the disappearance, and when somebody finally asked him outright why he wouldn’t hand round a single biscuit, he looked wounded, cracked the lid open just enough to prove his point, and there, blinking up at all of us with an expression of total bewilderment, was A HAMSTER!!! A fat one. In a biscuit tin. I want it known that this was, by a good distance, the most sensible thing that happened to me all morning.

I was properly introducing myself to the hamster, because SOMEBODY needed to be nice to it, when I spotted the hedge.

It was just an ordinary hedge, or it should have been, running along beside the steps, except there was a hole in it about the size of me, and the edges of the hole were dark in a way hedges are absolutely NOT supposed to be dark. I reached out, only out of curiosity, I promise, and I’d barely got halfway there when Bramwell AND Thaddeus grabbed me and hauled me backwards so hard I nearly fell over!!! I mean, is that the way a junior colleague should be treated?!! NO, it is not!!!

“Just in case,” Bramwell said, which, and I stand by this, is not an explanation!!

Turned out, once the scholars had crowded around arguing about it for ages, that it was a portal, formed, apparently, from too many footnotes piling up in one spot, the way damp builds up in a room nobody ever airs out, and everyone agreed, with FAR more enthusiasm than I found comforting, that somebody would have to go through it.

So I went back to the hamster. Seemed like the better use of my time, and frankly the better company. I want it noted, clearly, in writing, that I was NOT consulted about whatever happened next. I was not asked. I was not so much as glanced at! The first I knew about any of it was a rope going tight round my middle and the ground simply not being under my feet any more.

I did not so much fall through that hedge as get LAUNCHED through it, and I have since worked out, mostly from Bramwell looking guilty about it afterwards, that this was the result of a short and horribly practical little chat between him and Thaddeus about who among us was small enough to fit and who could most easily be spared, neither of which, I would like it formally recorded, I was ever asked my opinion on!!! Again, NOT the way a junior colleague should be treated!!!

I was still mid scream when I hit the mud.

IV. On the Far Side of the Hedge

Pip’s Account, continued

I landed flat on my face in a puddle that had clearly been lying in wait its whole existence for exactly this purpose, and I am not going to write down everything I said next because I am a professional and this is meant to be an official document, but “tea party” came up more than once, along with several things about hedges, rope, and the general sanity of everybody I currently work with who should know better about how NOT to treat a junior colleague!!!!!

I got up slowly, wiped what mud I could off my face with a sleeve that was already a lost cause, and then noticed two things, very quickly, one after the other.

First, I was still tied to the rope, trailing back through the hole behind me, which I was extremely, genuinely grateful for, even in the middle of being furious. Second, I couldn’t hear any of them anymore. Not the scholars. Not Professor Ashcombe still on her third theory. Not Bramwell. Not even a hint of Thaddeus being quietly, infuriatingly competent somewhere nearby. There was just nothing coming through that hedge at all, and for about two whole seconds that felt like the biggest relief of my entire life, and then it properly hit me that it also meant nobody knew exactly where I was, in a place made out of too many footnotes, looking for a scholar who by every account I’d heard was probably just as ridiculous as the ones I’d left behind. And I’ll be honest, my throat went rather tight at that point, and I had to stand there blinking a lot before I trusted myself to carry on, because there was absolutely nobody around to see it and I intended to keep it that way.

Then I looked around properly.

Same landscape, more or less. Same slope, same shape of hedge and hill I’d just come flying through. Except all the colour had drained straight out of it, gone flat and grey, and instead of grass and hedgerow and an ordinary summer morning, there was just writing. Everywhere. Hurried, scrawled, messy writing, the sort you do when you’re trying to catch a thought before it runs off and haven’t got time to make it neat, all woven into the shapes of things, so a tree was really just an enormous looping column of scribble, and a patch of what should have been grass turned out, when I got close, to be thousands of tiny illegible words crammed in edge to edge. I could NOT make my eyes hold still on any of it. Everything kept sliding out of focus the moment I tried to look properly, which was horrible, and after about a minute of trying I gave up, kept a hand on the rope, and just walked.

I saw the colour before I understood what I was looking at. One single bright patch of it, right in the middle of all that grey scribble, like a match struck in a dark room, and when I got closer it turned out to be a man, the ONLY thing in the whole place drawn properly, standing behind a lectern that somebody had clearly hacked out of an actual fallen log, giving a lecture, of all things, in this strange place!

I use the word “audience” generously. It was a whole crowd of woodland creatures, badgers and rabbits and something that might once have been a fox, all drawn in the same scribbly grey as everything else, and not one of them was listening to a single word. One rabbit was asleep standing up. A badger was having a lovely time scratching itself behind, I think, was its ear. The maybe-fox kept eyeing the treeline like it was working out its odds.

The man had to be Professor Thornvale. He was going at it properly, both hands moving, delivering what sounded, even from a distance, like the most tedious lecture I have ever had the misfortune to be near, to an audience who had never once agreed to be there.

I shouted at him, and he didn’t even stop his stupid lecture! I shouted LOUDER. Still nothing. I clapped, which felt completely ridiculous given the circumstances, but I was running out of ideas and got absolutely nothing for that either. He carried on, totally lost in whatever he was saying, and the scribbled woodland creatures carried on ignoring him, and I stood there feeling like the only sane person left in a place that had never claimed to be sane to begin with, which, I’ll admit, made me want to laugh rather a lot, in a slightly hysterical way, though I managed not to. Mostly.

So I sat down at the back with the audience, on the theory that if shouting wasn’t working, maybe just being there would, and settled in to actually try to listen, since I’d come an unreasonable distance and felt I ought to at least give it a try.

I don’t remember deciding to fall asleep. I remember the lecture going on and on, dense and droning, delivered in the voice of a man completely in love with the sound of his own reasoning, and I remember thinking the badger had absolutely the right idea, and then nothing at all until a voice somewhere above me said “I will now take questions,” and some deep, buried reflex from every dull staff meeting I’ve ever sat through shot my hand straight up in the air before the rest of me had properly woken up.

The lecture stopped.

I opened my eyes to Professor Thornvale staring at me with an expression of such enormous, delighted shock that I genuinely wondered for a second if I’d grown a second head in my sleep.

“You,” he said, “are not a smudge.”

I did not have a brilliant answer ready, being freshly woken, extremely muddy, and completely unclear on what a smudge was meant to be in this context, so instead I asked, since he was finally paying attention to somebody, how much longer he was planning on staying, seeing as everyone back at the Archive missed him rather a lot.

His eyebrows shot up. He looked round properly, at the grey scribbled hill, the scribbled trees, the audience who couldn’t care less, like he was seeing the whole thing for the very first time and did not think much of it now he had, and his face went from delighted straight to horrified in about half a second.

“Ah,” he said. “Oh, dear.”

And then everything happened terribly fast. He came round that lectern at a dead sprint, grabbed me under one arm like a sack of potatoes somebody urgently needed moved, and set off back down the way the rope led, and it was REALLY uncomfortable being carried like potatoes!! I was almost sick!

V. The Return

Bramwell’s Log

I did not see them come back through the hedge so much as become suddenly aware that Pip, with an unfamiliar man in scholar’s robes still holding him rather firmly under one arm, had arrived in the immediate vicinity of my feet, at speed, and that I had narrowly avoided being knocked from the steps by the pair of them.

I had, by then, been standing on the front steps for the better part of forty minutes, in the company of Thaddeus, several increasingly fractious scholars, and a hamster, listening to no fewer than three revised theories as to what ought to be done, none of which had involved doing anything at all. I record this only so the relief of the moment might be properly understood.

“Dunvaris,” cried out Professor Ashcombe, in a voice that had clearly been saving itself for this exact occurrence, and came at him with both arms out and seven colleagues close behind her.

It was, I think, the sight of them coming that reminded Professor Thornvale he was still holding a member of my staff like a parcel. He set Pip down rather hurriedly upon the step, one hand briefly steadying him by the shoulder as though only then remembering Pip had legs of his own and might reasonably wish to use them, and it was in that same moment, before the scholars properly closed in, that Thaddeus and I both reached him, one from each side, and drew him clear of what would otherwise have become the very centre of the crush.

Pip did not resist this in the slightest. He came towards us both without a word, which, for Pip, told me a great deal, that we were both in severe trouble with our younger colleague.

What followed I can only describe as a stampede conducted at close range, though by then it was one we three were watching from a safe distance rather than standing inside. Seven scholars, and I believe a further two who had arrived in the interim and whom I had not previously met, converged upon Professor Thornvale from every available direction, seizing his hand and shaking it with a vigour that seemed likely to do him a fresh injury even as it celebrated his recovery from the last one, patting him upon his head, his shoulder, his back, one elderly gentleman patting him rather firmly upon his cheek as though checking he was solid. Professor Thornvale bore this with the dazed good humour of someone who has had a very unusual morning and has not yet had time to process any of it.

The whole assembled party then bore him bodily back up the steps and through the great doors of the Archive, still shaking his hand, still patting, calling questions and offering theories that I noted, even now, contradicted one another comprehensively, and the doors shut behind the lot of them with a heavy, final thud that left the three of us standing upon the front steps of an institution we had, in the end, never once managed to go inside.

Nobody thanked us.

It was in the general scramble for the door that the scholar with the biscuit tin abandoned it outright, tin and all, upon the step where he had been standing, apparently having decided, in the excitement, that a returned colleague mattered rather more than a fat and confused hamster. Thaddeus regarded the tin for a long moment. Then he crouched down, opened the lid properly, looked inside, and produced a note, which he handed to me without comment.

I am keeping the hamster. I have named him Barnaby.

I asked whether he thought this wise, given neither of us knew the first thing about keeping a hamster, nor whose hamster it technically was. He wrote a second note.

Nobody has claimed it.

And then, before I could formulate a reply to that, a third.

I have decided this is now my decision to make.

I did not feel this warranted further discussion and said so. Thaddeus tucked the tin under one arm, and that was that.

VI. The Walk Back to the Valley

Bramwell’s Log, continued

Pip was still standing between Thaddeus and myself, mud dried stiff along one side of his face, the rope still knotted about his middle. He was making a considerable effort to look as though the morning had been nothing more than a mild inconvenience. I have known him some while now, and I recognised the set of his jaw that means he is holding himself together by will alone.

Thaddeus reached over and ruffled his hair, the way he does, and pressed a note into my hand as he did it.

I think Pip is angry with us.

I put a hand briefly on Pip’s shoulder myself, and neither of us said anything else about it, because there are moments that go better without commentary and this struck me as plainly one of them.

Pip allowed this for perhaps three seconds. Then he stepped back, set about untying the rope with the brisk determination of a young man who has decided he is done being manipulated for one day, and once it was free, he did not look at either of us again.

“Pip,” I called after him.

“I,” he said, already several strides down the path ahead of us, “am going to go and beg the Wandering Library to let me into that tea party instead. At least nobody there throws me through a hedge without ASKING me!!!”

He did not wait for a reply. He did not look back. Thaddeus and I trailed after him at a respectful distance, watching him march the whole way down towards the valley with the sort of energy of someone who intends to be furious for at least another hour and does not wish to be talked out of it early. It seemed, on reflection, the wiser course to let him have his head start.

“I hope they let us inside while they have their tea party,” I said to Thaddeus as we walked, “I don’t suppose you have any preference as to cake?”

Thaddeus considered this with the gravity he brings to most questions and produced a note, pressed into my hand without breaking stride: Something with ginger in it, if Dame Pellifrax allows us in.

I said I thought that a reasonable request, and that I would put in a word for seed cake myself, on the grounds that a man ought to have priorities.

We walked on for a while in agreeable silence, weighing the relative merits of various cakes we had never been offered and had, that morning, given the Library considerable reason not to offer us now. It was Thaddeus who broke the quiet, some minutes later, with a second note, shorter than the first, which he handed me without ceremony and which I have decided, for the sake of the record, requires no further comment from me.

It read: We probably shouldn’t have thrown him through the hedge.

I looked at it for a moment. Then I said that I thought an apology was very much in order, and that in my professional experience, the most effective apologies tend to involve cake, and that we would simply have to hope Dame Pellifrax had made enough to go round three unrepentant, unwashed, and thoroughly humbled staff members who had, on reflection, made rather a poor morning of things.

Thaddeus did not disagree, and the tin under his arm, for its part, offered no opinion either way.

Author’s Note:

I hope you enjoyed this latest instalment from the MirMarnian scholars, who I realise are not making the greatest impression these days. Hopefully, this worrying factor is overshadowed by the fact that we now have a new furry friend to keep Pemberton the chicken company in the Wandering Library!
-Chaiga T. Cheska