Night Music by John Connolly Page A

characters, and all—fearful that the discovery by Mr. Berger of the library’s true nature might bring some trouble upon them, but the old gentleman opened the door to Mr. Berger’s knock on the glass and seemed very pleased to see him.
    â€œWill you take some tea?” asked Mr. Gedeon, and Mr. Berger agreed, even though he had already had tea at breakfast and was anxious to return to Anna. Still, he had questions for Mr. Gedeon, particularly pertaining to the lady.
    â€œWhy does she do it?” he asked, as he and Mr. Gedeon shared an apple scone.
    â€œDo what?” said Mr. Gedeon. “Oh, you mean throw herself under trains?”
    He picked a crumb from his waistcoat and put it on his plate.
    â€œFirst of all, I should say that she doesn’t make a habit of it,” said Mr. Gedeon. “In all the years that I’ve been here, she’s done it no more than a dozen times. Admittedly, the incidents have been growing more frequent, and I have spoken to her about them in an effort to find some way to help, but she doesn’t seem to know herself why she feels compelled to relive her final moments in the book. We have other characters that return to their fates—just about all of our Thomas Hardy characters appear obsessed by them—but she’s the only one who re-enacts her end. I can only give you my thoughts on the matter, and I’d say this: she’s the titular character, and her life is so tragic, her fate so awful, that it could mean both are imprinted upon the reader, and herself, in a particularly deep and resonant way. It’s in the quality of the writing. It’s in the book. Books have power. You must understand that now. It’s why we keep all of these first editions so carefully. The fate of characters is set forever in those volumes. There’s a link between those editions and the characters that arrived here with them.”
    He shifted in his chair, and pursed his lips.
    â€œI’ll share something with you, Mr. Berger, something that I’ve never shared with anyone before,” he said. “Some years ago, we had a leak in the roof. It wasn’t a big one, but they don’t need to be big, do they? A little water dripping for hours and hours can do a great deal of damage, and it wasn’t until I got back from the picture house in Moreham that I saw what had happened. You see, before I left I’d set aside our manuscript copies of Alice in Wonderland and Moby-Dick .”
    â€œ Moby-Dick ?” said Mr. Berger. “I wasn’t aware that there were any extant manuscripts of Moby-Dick .”
    â€œIt’s an unusual one, I’ll admit,” said Mr. Gedeon. “Somehow it’s all tied up with confusion between the American and British first editions. The American edition, by Harper & Brothers, was set from the manuscript, and the British edition, by Bentley’s, was in turn set from the American proofs, and there are some six hundred differences in wording between the two editions. But in 1851, while Melville was working on the British edition based on proofs that he himself had paid to be set and plated before an American publisher had signed an agreement, he was also still writing some of the later parts of the book, and in addition he took the opportunity to rewrite sections that had already been set for America. So which is the edition that the library should store: the American, based on the original manuscript, or the British, based not on the manuscript but on a subsequent rewrite? The decision made by the Trust was to acquire the British edition and, just to be on the safe side, the manuscript. When Captain Ahab arrived at the library, both editions arrived with him.”
    â€œAnd the manuscript of Alice in Wonderland ? I understood that to be in the collection of the British Museum.”
    â€œSome sleight of hand there, I believe,” said Mr. Gedeon. “You may recall that the Reverend