Palaeographist

The problem today is a nota sign. Medieval scribes, desperate to save vellum (costly, made from calfskin) and time, invented a shorthand that makes modern texting look verbose. A single tilde over a vowel stands for a dropped n or m . A hooked p means per or par . A squiggle like a 9 with a tail is con . But the Hasty Brother has invented his own. Lena has encountered a symbol that looks like a treble clef after a nervous breakdown. It appears three times in the cartulary, always in the same phrase: “…and to the aforesaid [symbol] of the chapter…”

“Palaeographist” is not a word that fits on a nameplate. It sounds like a fossil of a fossil, a profession that went extinct shortly after the printing press. But Lena corrects this assumption the way she corrects a scribe’s eccentric abbreviation: gently, precisely, and with a quiet ferocity. “I’m a reader of dead handwriting,” she tells new acquaintances at dinner parties, watching their eyes glaze over. “No, not séances. Worse. I read the handwriting of people who were certain they were being clear.” palaeographist

That is the palaeographist’s curse and calling: to become intimate with the dead. Lena has spent thirty years in this trade. She has read the tear-blurred confession of a fourteenth-century nun who loved another woman. She has deciphered the shopping list of a Tudor fishmonger (eels, saffron, “new bucket for the brine”). She has identified, from a single misspelled satisfaccioun , the Welsh accent of a scribe in Henry VIII’s exchequer. She has held a letter from a Napoleonic prisoner of war, written on a scrap of a French broadside with a splinter dipped in soot and urine, and she has read the line “Martha, the baby said ‘papa’ yesterday” in a hand so cramped and desperate that her own hand cramped in sympathy. The problem today is a nota sign