"Did you have a pleasant evening? And have you returned with your virtue intact?" asked Penrose. Ever the gentleman, he held her program and handbag as he helped her off with her coat. This action also served to highlight how Trip had not done so once all evening.
"It was lovely, thank you, except that my virtue is as intact as it was when I left," she said formally, retrieving her handbag.
"Good." Penrose examined the program. "Carmina Burana. Did you like that?"
"Yes. I've heard bits of it on TV, and a recording of it once before, but it was simply amazing to hear live." Her enthusiasm bubbled up again.
Penrose opened the program up to the libretto and smiled to himself. "That's different. Now I'm wondering which manuscript was older."
"Are you familiar with it?"
"Indeed. A prior tenant had a recording which he played incessantly for seven months. I've always found Orff's choice of poems interesting."
"What do you mean?"
"I'll show you. Come back to the library." He did not take her arm, but cupped a hand beneath her elbow and drew her along without touching her skin. The cold from his fingertips sent a tingle down her spine. They walked back to the library where he switched on several lights and then pulled a ladder over to a bookcase in one corner. Scanning the shelves carefully, he slowly climbed the ladder. At last he opened the glass door and removed a heavy, odd-sized volume which he gently placed on a reading table.
She aahed over the gold leaf pressed into the brown leather cover. The title was in an arcane Gothic script, too stylized for her to read, and the volume had the look she associated with scrapbooks, something about the shape suggested that it had been bound by hands that had been dust for centuries.
She reached out a hesitant hand to the cover. "May I?"
He nodded.
She opened it carefully. It was clearly old and delicate, and she was afraid of accidentally breaking the binding. Every page was illuminated with giant capital letters entwined with fantastic beasts and flowers, or with borders of more beasts, or people doing naughty things. Or beasts and people doing naughty things, she found when she looked closely. "What is this?"
"It's a fourteenth century copy of the Seckau manuscript, which may or may not have been the original that was the source for the collection Orff used when he composed Carmina Burana." He pointed to a page that contained a poem and a kind of musical notation consisting of little squares instead of the ovoid notes which had tortured her piano lessons as a child. "These are poems and songs by goliards, the wandering students and minstrels of the day who wrote satiric and extremely secular verse in Latin."
"Did Orff use this music in his composition?"
"No, he ignored it completely."
She ran her fingertips over the parchment, smooth and animal, and so unlike paper. The next page was crudely illustrated with the Wheel of Fortune. A jolly king with crown and scepter rode the wheel. Before him, a lost soul fell headlong off to Hell, and another was clawing its way up the wheel to pull the crown from the king's head. Below the wheel a skeleton grinning with bony horror danced into the arms of waiting demons.
She shivered and Penrose vanished to reappear with a silken stole which he laid across her shoulders. She pulled it close around her and bent closer to the page. "Egestatem, potestatem dissolvit ut glaciem." She compared it with the translation in the libretto.
"Can you read Latin?"
She shook her head. "No, I studied French in high school, and the scheduling never let me squeeze in Latin, or anything else. It was the same story at university."
Together they paged through the manuscript. He showed her the poems that had been used in the cantata, as well as some that had not, and gave a rough translation. Judging by the pictures on some of the pages, she guessed that his translation was edited to conform to his own ideas about what was appropriate for the ears of a young lady.
As they wandered through the text, the effects of the cup of coffee she had consumed with her dessert slowly wore off. Seeing her unsuccessfully try to hide a yawn, Penrose closed the manuscript and said, "This must be enough for one evening."
"Oh no," she started, but was cut off by another yawn.
He carefully replaced the book in the bookcase. "You can come back and look at it any time you want," he told her.
She thanked him, asking, "Can that book really be six hundred years old? It looks like new. So do all those clothes up in the attic. How could they be in such good shape after being in storage for three hundred years? They should have disintegrated when we touched them."
"Oh, that." Penrose climbed back down the ladder. "It's a manipulation of the ether. This house is located at a convergence of ley lines." At her blank look, he explained, "Ley lines are long wrinkles of concentrated force in the ether. I found a way draw out that force so it preserves the house and everything in it. It keeps things from falling apart with age, more or less, although I've had trouble with the electrical and mechanical parts."
"Like the fuse box?"
"Precisely. I think it will be safe as long as a real electrician doesn't touch it."
Bob called her from the doorway. "Elizabeth? Are you talking to yourself again?"
She smiled at Penrose. "Yes, but I'm finished now." She shut off the lights and wished Bob goodnight in a way that included Penrose.