Minnie tried - oh how she tried! - to maintain an air of cautious, emotionless analysis. Not even analysis, not now, but transcription. She began with the very first of the pages, even going so far as to make (exceptionally rough) sketches of the fish pictures, to perhaps capture enough detail that she could identify them later, though she suspected that perhaps that her new acquaintance would likely have already identified them. She jotted a note to ask him - but thought it best to wait until she was finished.
She scratched her minuscule hand across the wax tablet, copying page after page, not simply the striking images, but the mundane receipts as well. She, after all, had spent more than her share of time in life reading over ship's logs, which had a way of being almost comically terse, and filled with each captain's own peculiar shorthand, sometimes made up quite on the spot, and seldom properly recorded into a key for posterity. She'd once worked through a log which each day would have notes similar to "3 d.p., r.s. w.s." alongside descriptions of the weather, irregularities in coastline formations against the charts of the times, knot measurements, and all manner of other mundanities. The little notation had teased her, particularly as it was so insistently repeated. IT was only after some clever guesses regarding the voyage's length (it was at sea far too long, and a navigator confirmed to her that the end of the voyage had involved in simply sailing in circles outside the mouth of the bay) that she was able to divine that a plague had struck the ship at sea - the notes stood for "3 dead plague, reduce stores for winding sheet", the latter being a properly tidy description of the reduction in his stores of sail-cloth, necessary for winding the bodies up for sea-burial.
The logs, then would have fascinated her enough to patient but for the fact that... well, this was Kenabelle Wright, and she simply had to cheat, she had to do the scholars equivalent of peeking at the end of the book. She set down her tablet and skimmed through the dates, glancing at the entries, until she arrived at significant places in time - Kena's time as the captain of the Abura trade route, the days surrounding her departure (in case some news might have arrived to Abura regarding it), a slower perusal of the time of her voyage. There were several things that caught her eye, suggested further avenues of research - the 'f.t.e. a/ red spires' struck her as the sort of lead that might be easy to resolve, and mine for further details, for example.
And then, the period where Captain Wright would have returned to Abura, her crew broken, her heart bent with grief.
k.w. here, somehow.
She gasped audibly, and she read and reread the entry. She turned, read the next entry, slowly, and gasped again, taking the box out again, gently, to look at it, staring as if, somehow, the wood would with this prompt begin to speak, to tell her who 'the lady' was, what she 'already had the key' to.
And then a gap. She turned the pages back and forth, literally going so far as to examine the binding to see if a page was torn out, her mind desperate for a detail, for a hint, for something.
Her mind reeled and yawed. Of course, the gap felt so obvious in retrospect - it would almost certainly have been the season of traveling with Her, long enough to arrive (though speedily, in an undermanned ship, her mind was impressed by the Akvataris' sailing skill), and then for the Akvatari to return home, and for the next season of orders to begin. Her mind, once again, chid her for all of the missed opportunities she'd made over the years, particularly simple questions she could have asked Hannah before her death - when did the last Akvatari leave to return home? What did she do in Abura between their arrival and departure there? But most of those questions, she suspected, Hannah would have had only marginally useful answers to, for it was so manifestly clear that, even to her intimates, even to Hannah, to Stephanie Brooks (or had she?), perhaps and more than likely Douglas Stone. To Charm, certainly, who had clearly meant so much to her.
And that secret! Why? For her nature, to Minnie's mind (and after all, she could flatter herself to think that after so many years of study, she knew a LITTLE of her nature) seemed so averse to sneakery and skullduggery, to secret codes, and buried knowledge. She was a sailor, first of all, the quintessential sailor, in fact, and had all of a sailor's frankness and generosity. No sailor, had they learned anything that might aid future voyages, would hold it back except under the most dire of circumstances, for sailors more than most men knew the high cost of ignorance. And then there was Bethany, Bethany who Kenabelle loved so dearly, who, in the midst of the most dangerous sea voyage in history, had taken the time to stop and record the finer linguistic points of an obscure dialect from halfway around the world, simply because it was a thing which should be known. Bethany, whose very parting plea had been to 'write it down', a plea that Kenabelle respected with such earnestness that she recorded it for the world to see and to hold as a yardstick against her own records.
Those two souls, wondrous souls, they would not have simply... simply hidden something beautiful and sublime away, they would not have worked to obscure things forever. Yes, it was, TECHNICALLY, possibly, Minnie admitted, tto imagine a situation in which she was simply wrong, where they had drives and ambitions, or secrets, or sins worth hiding, things that they might deviously keep from the world. But be it blindness or loyalty - or her own heart's intuition, for she had LOOKED into Bethany's eyes, and long before that, she'd lived with both women as living presences in her own heart and mind - she refused to believe such things. She had kept, as it were, the secrets secret not only because she had been directed to, but because a part of her whispered that if she could not show the secret, others would not work to solve them as much as to malign those who had kept them, for in the end, men loved to pull a hero into the mud.
And, after all, the University had its own secrets, secrets it kept clawed so close to itself that they had had the temerity to deny the request of Charm Wright herself, to see them, to see things about her own sister. And this, perhaps, Minnie mused, might account for the whole mess. The locked cabinets - if the university had found those cryptic books, would they not have locked them in the damned archives? Hannah's ignorance - dear Hannah, who had loved so much to tell her stories, was it not a protection for her not to know things that the University might have silenced her to keep them from being spoken? And this box, kept close so long, but the secret told to one person - to Charm, to wise, brave and discrete Charm, who would have never betrayed that secret, until she --
She stopped abruptly at that thought, but a voice in her mind finished it for her, clearly and sharply.
Until she, Charm Wright, had found someone that she could trust to unravel that gnarled skein of hidden things.
Of a sudden Minnie felt very small, like a young hare in an open field with a hawk overhead. There is nothing to be done thinking that direction, I just need to stop, to do the work. Whatever's landed me here, whatever Mother Qalaya's hand would press me toward, there's nothing to be done except to write it down, to write it all down and keep finding more to be written.
With a bit of a pallor in her cheeks, she turned back to where her transcription left off. There was much to be written,a nd she took, finally, to writing straight into a book, carefully stopping, checking that she had transcribed things correctly as she went, setting a margin for marking possible translations of abbreviations, questions, leads to be followed. She copied, laboriously, writing, writing, always writing, until the hand that was still flesh was sore with holding the pages open, until her eyes burned with staring, she wrote and wrote and wrote, until the last corners of the book were written.
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