Night Music by John Connolly Page B

Dodgson gave the original ninety-page manuscript to Alice Liddell, but she was forced to sell it in order to pay death duties following her husband’s demise in 1928. Sotheby’s sold it on her behalf, suggesting a reserve of four thousand pounds. It went, of course, for almost four times that amount, to an American bidder. At that point, the Trust stepped in, and a similar manuscript copy was substituted and sent to the United States.”
    â€œSo the British Museum now holds a fake?”
    â€œNot a fake, but a later copy, made by Dodgson’s hand at the instigation of an agent of the Trust. In those days, the Trust was always thinking ahead, and I’ve tried to keep up that tradition. I’ve always got an eye out for a book or character that may be taking off.
    â€œSo the Trust was very keen to have Dodgson’s original Alice : so many iconic characters, you see, and then there were the illustrations, too. It’s an extremely powerful manuscript.
    â€œBut all of this is beside the point. Both of the manuscripts needed a bit of attention—just a careful clean to remove any dust or other media with a little polyester film. Well, I almost cried when I returned to the library. Some of the water from the ceiling had fallen on the manuscripts: just drops, nothing more, but enough to send a little of the ink from Moby-Dick onto a page of the Alice manuscript.”
    â€œAnd what happened?” asked Mr. Berger.
    â€œFor one day, in all extant copies of Alice in Wonderland , there was a whale at the Mad Hatter’s tea party,” said Mr. Gedeon solemnly.
    â€œWhat? I don’t remember that.”
    â€œNobody does, nobody but I. I worked all day to clean the relevant section, and gradually removed all traces of Melville’s ink. Alice in Wonderland went back to the way it was before, but for that day every copy of the book, and all critical commentaries on it, noted the presence of a white whale at the tea party.”
    â€œGood grief! So the books can be changed?”
    â€œOnly the copies contained in the library’s collection, and they in turn affect all others. This is not just a library, Mr. Berger: it’s the ur -library. It has to do with the rarity of the books in its collection and their links to the characters. That’s why we’re so careful with them. We have to be. No book is really a fixed object. Every reader reads a book differently, and each book works in a different way on the reader. But the books here are special. They’re the books from which all later copies came. I tell you, Mr. Berger, not a day goes by in this place that doesn’t bring me one surprise or another, and that’s the truth.”
    But Mr. Berger was no longer listening. He was thinking again of Anna and the awfulness of those final moments as the train approached, of her fear and her pain, and how she seemed doomed to repeat them because of the power of the book that bore her name.
    But the contents of the books were not fixed. They were open not only to differing interpretations, but also to actual transformation.
    Fates could be altered.
XIII
    Mr. Berger did not act instantly. He had never considered himself a duplicitous individual, and he tried to tell himself that his actions in gaining Mr. Gedeon’s confidence were as much to do with his enjoyment of that gentleman’s company, and his fascination with the Caxton, as with any desire he might have harbored to save Anna Karenina from further fatal encounters with locomotives.
    There was more than a grain of truth to this. Mr. Berger did enjoy spending time with Mr. Gedeon, for the librarian was a vast repository of information about the library and the history of his predecessors. Similarly, no bibliophile could fail to be entranced by the library’s inventory, and each day among its stacks brought new treasures to light, some of which had been acquired purely for their rarity value rather than