The Dream Weavers by Barbara Erskine (books you have to read txt) 📕

expecting to see the library itself, but instead he found himself in an empty room, with nothing more than a large trestle table on which lay a selection of old – very old – books, with a few mismatched dining chairs scattered round the walls.

‘We brought them in here so we could see them properly,’ Phil put in. ‘The library itself has no tables or chairs. Most of the furniture in the house is rotten, to be frank, and we’ve been warned that the lovely old oak pieces that have survived probably have no value these days anyway, so we are counting on the books.’

There was an Anglepoise lamp on the table, attached to a trailing lead. Phil leaned forward to switch it on.

‘That’s an old Welsh Bible,’ Jane explained to Simon, pointing at a huge vellum bound volume, and these are diaries of some kind; judging by the writing, they could be fifteenth or sixteenth century.’ Her finger pointed along the line of books. ‘One or two of these have bookworm and need urgent conservation, but most are in reasonable condition, considering their age. There is an early Shakespeare here. That on its own, if it’s a first folio, is probably worth a million or two, I would guess.’ She paused for effect, glancing from one to the other with a delighted grin. ‘But this is our pièce de résistance.’ She stopped to pull some foam supports from her bag and arranged them on the table, then she carefully lifted a volume towards them into the pool of light from the lamp and, cushioning it on the rests, she opened it at the first page. It was fairly large and heavy, and as Jane opened it, Simon saw the neatly inscribed writing on the pages, the coloured initials.

He stared down at it in awe. Pulling forward a chair, he sat down and stared at the page.

‘Yes, that’s Old English,’ he breathed.

‘What does it say?’ Kate whispered. ‘Can you read it?’

‘In the year of Christ’s Nativity, 494, Cerdic and Cynric, his son, landed at Cerdicessora with five ships.’ He looked up. ‘It’s a copy of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.’

‘A copy?’ Kate looked devastated.

He smiled at her. ‘Everything was a copy, don’t forget, until the invention of printing. There are various surviving versions of the chronicle. They are histories of the island of Britain. It’s believed that the original version was written for King Alfred and then copies were sent around the country to various monasteries, where they were kept. Each monastery then continued to keep the chronicles up to date by adding to their own version. The closest one in this part of the world that I can think of offhand is the Worcester Chronicle, but these chronicles would have been copied and distributed all over the place. Which doesn’t,’ he added hastily, seeing Kate’s continuing disappointment, ‘detract from the value. To be honest, I haven’t a clue how much it would be worth. You would need a writing expert to date it, but it’s obviously a very early copy, and it’s written in Old English. Some of the marginally later copies – and I’m talking perhaps twelfth century rather than eleventh – were written in Middle English.’

He desperately wanted them to go away and let him read it. His fingers were quite literally itching to turn the pages.

He turned to Jane. ‘Are you going to advise sending it to London?’

Jane nodded. ‘I think that’s what Kate and Phil will probably decide to do. I have suggested we might invite someone here from one of the auction houses to have a look.’

‘Would you allow me to transcribe some of this into modern English first?’ Simon was carefully turning the pages. He looked up at Kate. ‘I wouldn’t take it away. I would come and do it here. As I think Jane told you, I am writing a history of Mercia, and this is the nearest thing I will ever come to first-hand reporting of what I am writing about. It might be a different version to the one I know. It might have extra bits we don’t know about. Local bits.’ He reached out and laid his fingers gently on the page. He was gabbling, he knew it, but he couldn’t stop himself.

Kate glanced at her husband. ‘I don’t see why not.’

‘And with your permission, I will meanwhile contact one or two people I know who deal in medieval manuscripts,’ Jane said. ‘I won’t tell anyone where you are, and neither will Simon, until you have had a chance to make a decision about what to do and who we should show them to. In the meantime, I do advise you to keep these under lock and key.’

As Simon climbed back into Jane’s car he could feel himself shaking. ‘I don’t think I had let myself believe you. If that is genuine, they’re sitting on a fortune that would probably make a Shakespeare first folio look cheap.’

‘I hope so, for their sake.’ Jane reversed the car and headed back up the overgrown drive. ‘And in the meantime you can go back tomorrow and start copying. So you are hoping for something that isn’t in the other versions?’

Simon lowered his window and took a deep breath of cold air. ‘You mentioned Offa and his family?’

Jane nodded. ‘One of the pages I looked at when I first came over seemed to contain his name a great deal, with some women’s names. And there are pages that have been scratched out. You’ll see when you go through it.’

Simon felt his stomach tighten with excitement. ‘It’s unlikely there will be anything new, but as you say, I won’t know till I read it. The narrative stopped, I noticed, in 1055. Some versions went on into the twelfth century. Just touching it was something so special, and with a bit of luck a local monk might have inserted something extra. That’s the joy of the chronicles. Mostly they are annals, as you know, a year-by-year account