The Forgotten Book Read online

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  In the beginning was the Word

  John 1:1

  ONE NIGHT

  She was crying as she turned the handle and tugged at it. The window was stuck—it was old, antique, like everything else in this place. It was a place seemingly untouched by time, as if the decades simply blew past like leaves in the wind. A place where nothing ever changed, where seconds and years had no meaning. Even the night felt centuries old, as if this was the same night that had fallen for hundreds of years. Somber, blacker than black, it loomed over the treetops and cloaked the high walls the way it always had—and yet, things had changed. Things, people, and words.

  And not necessarily in that order.

  Her legs trembled as she climbed onto the window ledge, blinking back the tears and breathing in the ancient darkness. Not even the moon, it seemed, wanted any part in this—it was very high in the sky, very far away. But she’d known she was alone in this from the start. She hesitated a moment longer, then closed her eyes, and everything happened in a flash. The night air flooded her lungs. The blood roared in her ears as she leaned forward, loosened her grip on the window frame, and slid her feet over the edge. Words flashed through her mind, trying to tempt her. But they couldn’t reach her anymore—she was leaving them behind, just like everything else.

  She jumped off the ledge and the voices in her head fell silent.

  For the space of a heartbeat she was part of the never-ending night, and then the ground came up to meet her, fast. She was surprised in spite of herself.

  The landing wasn’t as hard as she’d feared. But it was hard enough to sprain her ankle. She gritted her teeth and ran. Her feet felt as though they were moving of their own accord.

  Pain shot through her with every step, hot and sharp. But she kept running. She couldn’t go back now, even if she’d wanted to. And it was too late, anyway—there was nothing she could do. No way of changing things. Not far to the Rhine.

  He was waiting for her.

  1

  It is a truth universally acknowledged that returning home after a long absence is one of the best feelings in the world. That’s how I felt, anyway, when I arrived back at Stolzenburg one rainy Friday afternoon to find the keep swathed in fog and the castle courtyard gray in the hazy afternoon light. It was unusually cold for August.

  Nevertheless I stood for a long moment outside the double entrance doors, closed my eyes, and breathed the smell of wet, age-old masonry deep into my lungs. Raindrops splashed down onto my face like a blustery welcoming committee, while the wind tugged at my ponytail as if trying to get it to dance.

  At last! I was home at last!

  This was the place I’d called home for the past four years, at any rate: the first place I’d ever known that felt like a real home. I spread my arms wide and was about to spin on the spot for joy when I heard the noise of an approaching car and decided against it.

  Through the gate came a gleaming black limousine, and out of it stepped Helena von Stein (the best student in my class, and currently head girl). She wafted toward me, opening an elegant umbrella.

  I let my arms fall back to my sides.

  “Emma.” Helena eyed my sodden suitcase and the mud stains on my red summer coat as the chauffeur lifted her luggage (suitcases, hatbox, and vanity case) out of the car. “Oh, dear. Did you walk here?” She raised one eyebrow.

  “Hi, Helena.” I beamed at her. Not even Princess von Stein, as I liked to call her, could put me in a bad mood today. True, I’d had to walk some of the way to the castle because my dad had forgotten to pick me up at the airport again. In fact, I’d taken one train and two buses from Cologne Bonn Airport and then walked almost two miles from the village to the castle; all in all I’d been traveling for over eight hours. But I certainly wasn’t going to tell Helena that. “I like walking,” I said. “Anyway, how was your holiday? You didn’t get stalked by that boy at the pool again, did you?”

  Helena’s lips twitched. “Of course not,” she said, pointing to her tanned face. “I’ve just got back from Mauritius, and it was amazing. And you? I’m guessing you went to see your mom in England again, right?” She made the word England sound not unlike a yawn. But Helena, whose parents were diplomats, had been to so many different countries that anything less than a trip to the moon probably wouldn’t have impressed her.

  “This time we went on a road trip,” I offered nonetheless. “A, um, a cultural study tour, to be exact. It was fascinating.”

  “Er, sure … how exciting. Anyway…” She flicked back her dark hair and followed her suitcases up the steps and into the castle before I could reply. Which was probably for the best, because I would honestly rather have dragged my suitcase another couple of miles uphill than give Helena any more details about my supposed “study tour.” And to think it had sounded like such a good idea when my mom had first suggested it.…

  Initially, the fact that the summer holidays coincided with my mom’s new boyfriend’s lecture tour had seemed like a golden opportunity. “We’ve got invitations from all over the country,” Mom had gushed. “It means you’ll get to see a bit more of England this time, not just Cambridge.” Even though my mom had a habit of putting on a husky voice and obsessively touching up her makeup whenever John was around, I’d still been looking forward to spending the seven-week summer holiday with her. We’d made plans to explore London, Manchester, Brighton, and Newcastle together.

  It soon transpired, however, that John (a distinguished professor of literature) didn’t approve of our proposed mother-daughter excursions. Instead he insisted we accompany him wherever he went, carrying his papers, pouring him glasses of water, and handing him pens with which to sign his books. By the end of the holiday, having sat through forty-two lectures in forty-two stuffy town halls the length and breadth of England, I felt that if I ever had to listen to John’s four-hour lecture on eighteenth-century women writers again, I would literally die of boredom. Some holiday this had been! But in spite of everything I’d decided to come out of it feeling positive—re-energized, even. True, I hadn’t spent weeks being “pestered” by a good-looking pool boy or the wealthy heir to a Cornish country estate. But my holidays had been so dull that they might almost have been described as … meditative. Yes, that was definitely the right word. There were people who would have spent seven weeks on a bed of nails in a Tibetan mountain monastery to achieve the kind of inner enlightenment I’d achieved (in a less monastic fashion, admittedly) over the course of forty-two lectures in a series of British town halls.

  Because, in between John’s pompous speeches and my mom’s breathless giggles at all his lame jokes, I’d gradually formulated a plan. I was sixteen years old now, and I felt it was time to take a few things in hand. Things that were long overdue. It was about time I challenged Princess von Stein for the role of head girl, for example. And tidied up the library. And started being more elegant and intelligent and independent in
general. And then, of course, there was Frederick …

  Once Helena had disappeared I thought about having another go at dancing in the rain, but I was afraid the chauffeur might come back at any moment and that the other pupils might start arriving—and besides, I was starting to get cold—so I decided against it.

  Instead, I made do with turning my face to the sky and taking one more deep breath. Pure, cool Stolzenburg air, fresh with rain. It really did feel good to be back: back in Germany and back at the castle. The gardeners had even planted out some of the pots around the entrance with pink fuchsias, which I loved. I smiled to myself.

  The new school year was starting on Monday and I, Emma Magdalena Morgenroth, felt readier than I had ever been. Ready for Year 11. Ready to grow up. I heaved my suitcase up the flight of steps, squared my shoulders, and stepped inside the imposing entrance hall of Stolzenburg School.

  * * *

  That was the day I found the book.

  Later on, I sometimes wondered what would have happened if I hadn’t stumbled across it. If we’d never gone into the library in the first place. Or if I had found it, but I’d cast it aside, just shoved it away on a bookshelf somewhere. What would have happened then?

  The west wing library was located, unsurprisingly, in the west wing of the castle, which was hardly ever used for day-to-day school life anymore. The classrooms were all in the northern wing of the castle and the common rooms and bedrooms where the school’s elite boarders lived and slept were situated in the east wing. Most of the west wing, however, had stood empty since the last time the castle had been renovated some eighty years earlier.

  At that time, one of the school’s former headmasters had decided that the teaching staff should no longer be housed in the castle itself but in apartments in the neighboring farm buildings. Ever since then the west wing, which was also the oldest part of Stolzenburg Castle, had been used mainly for storing tattered old maps, discarded furniture, and boxes full of yellowing exercise books. With its meter-thick walls and stone staircases, it was difficult to heat, and the water pipes often froze in winter. Only the ballroom on the first floor was in regular use. The rooms on the floors above remained for the most part in a state of cold, dusty hibernation.

  I’d always thought it was a bit of a waste, especially considering how beautiful the west wing library was. I’d had an inkling that the room was going to be perfect for our purposes, and now that I saw it with my own eyes I was delighted: Bookshelves covered the walls from floor to wood-paneled ceiling. Even around the windows, shelves had been put in, and all of them were full of old, expensively bound books. (These had long ago been superseded by the school’s media center, of course, which gave every student access to library books online.)

  There was also an open fireplace and a huge oak desk, several armchairs and sofas with carved wooden feet, a small intarsia table, and an impressive chandelier, which must have dated right back to the early days of electric lighting. There were a few things that were surplus to requirements—broken bits of furniture, antique lamps, piles of tattered papers, boxes full of old atlases bedecked with a thick layer of dirt and cobwebs—but it wouldn’t take long to get them out of the way. I rolled up the sleeves of my sweater.

  “Nice,” said Charlotte, taking a photo on her phone of the clutter around us; no doubt she would post it online later. “But are you sure your dad’s okay with it?”

  Charlotte was English, a little shorter and slimmer than me, and had the look of a porcelain doll with honey-colored curls. She had a thing about cats (the top she was wearing today had two black cats on it, with their tails entwined to form a heart) and she was also my best friend in the world. For four years now, ever since my first day at Stolzenburg, we’d sat next to each other in classes and shared all our secrets.

  “’Course he is,” I said. “The room never gets used, anyway.” During the most boring holiday in the history of holidays, I’d pictured exactly how it was going to be: We would commandeer the library and turn it into our own private retreat, somewhere to get away from the stress of lessons and the hustle and bustle of the dormitories. I was sure my dad would agree—he let me do whatever I wanted most of the time, so asking his permission was really just a formality. I’d run it by him when I got the chance.

  We clambered over cardboard boxes and other assorted clutter. “Just look at all these books. Isn’t this amazing?” I said as we stood in the center of the room. “And the fireplace! In winter we’ll have a fire, drink tea, and read the classics while the grandfather clock strikes the hour and ice crystals form on the windows. It’ll be lovely and cozy.”

  Charlotte eyed me skeptically. “The classics? You mean like Nathan the Wise? And other such thrilling reads?”

  She had a point. Charlotte clearly remembered my scathing comments about Lessing’s eighteenth-century play, which we’d read the year before.

  I pushed a rickety floor lamp out of the way. “It’s not necessarily all about the books. I was thinking more of a kind of secret society.” I’d read an article recently about famous student fraternities in the USA, and ever since then I’d been toying with the idea of starting my own elite little club at Stolzenburg. This was one of the oldest and best schools in Europe, after all, and secretly I was imagining a society like Skull and Bones at Yale University. But without any embarrassing rituals like lying around naked in coffins and stuff. “We could just meet here and chat, watch films, do our homework, whatever. It’ll be awesome.”

  “The idea of not having to fight for space on the common room sofas does have a certain appeal,” Charlotte conceded. She looked around the room for a moment, then sighed. “But we’re going to have to do some dusting.”

  “Thank you!” I brushed my bangs out of my face and launched into a detailed explanation of my idea: “So, I’ve got it all planned out. The first thing we need to do is get rid of all this junk. I thought we could shove it in the bedroom opposite; there’s plenty of room in there. Though I don’t know if we’ll be able to carry everything ourselves. But we’ll give it a try. Then we’ll sweep the floor and get rid of the spiderwebs and their delightful inhabitants. And this chest of drawers here—oh!” Charlotte had suddenly enveloped me in a bear hug.

  “I missed you. I didn’t even realize how much till now,” said Charlotte, still with her arms around me. She smelled a little of sea and sunscreen; she’d only just got back from holiday, too. Her family had been to Lanzarote. “I’m guessing it didn’t go the way you wanted with your mom?” she asked.

  “Nah, it was fine,” I mumbled. Charlotte knew me too well. She knew that the more enthusiastically I threw myself into school life, the worse it meant things were going with my family. Although Mom and I hadn’t actually argued the whole holiday. “It was bearable. It was just…” I thought for a moment, wondering why the disappointment of the holiday was bothering me so much. Being bored wasn’t the end of the world, after all, but … “I think the whole thing just made me realize that I can’t expect my parents to sort anything out for me anymore. That’s all,” I explained at last.

  It wasn’t exactly a groundbreaking realization, to be fair. I’d had to learn to rely on myself since my parents split up four years ago. My dad had been wrapped up in himself and his job as a headmaster, and my mom was preoccupied with her own chaotic life in England. Since the age of twelve I’d been washing my own clothes, checking my own homework, and deciding what to have for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

  No, my realization was really more of an admission to myself that what I’d always thought of as a sort of temporary state of affairs was never going to change. My dad was always going to be a workaholic, and my mom was always going to be busy “finding herself.” And I was sixteen now, and officially not a kid anymore. Only I could decide what to do with my life, and from now on that was exactly what I was going to do. It was that simple. From now on, I was going to be in charge of my own destiny.

  Charlotte pulled at my ponytail. “All right the
n,” she said. “Let’s make this year our best one yet. And let’s make this library our headquarters.”

  We grinned at each other and set to work. Together we lugged boxes and stacks of paper, three-legged chairs and crinkled lampshades into one of the rooms across the corridor. On top of those we piled globes with out-of-date borders, moth-eaten cushions, and moldy tennis rackets. It took nearly two hours to empty the library of all the things we didn’t need. Eventually, however, all that remained was an old chest of drawers in the middle of the room, which absolutely refused to budge. The thing weighed a ton! We leaned our whole weight against it, dug in our heels, and pushed and pulled with all our strength. But the beast didn’t move an inch.

  After a while Hannah (my new roommate—today was her first day at Stolzenburg) came to give us a hand. But not even our combined strength was enough to shift the chest of drawers. “Do you reckon it’s screwed to the floor?” Hannah panted as she and Charlotte pushed and I pulled as hard as I could.

  “It feels like it’s put down roots,” I grunted through gritted teeth. “Anchored itself in the bowels of the earth. They probably built the whole castle around this chest of drawers.”

  Hannah giggled.

  The two of us had immediately clicked. I’d taken to Hannah the moment I’d seen her empty the contents of her suitcase unceremoniously into her closet, saying it didn’t matter because she was going to be rummaging through her clothes like a raccoon every morning, anyway.

  Of course, I would have loved to share a room with Charlotte now that Francesca, my old roommate, had left Stolzenburg. But Charlotte had been sharing with Princess von Stein for years, and Mrs. Bröder-Strauchhaus—who taught biology and math, and was also in charge of bedroom allocations—was less than accommodating when it came to changing people’s sleeping arrangements. (She had some inane reason for this—something to do with us developing good social skills.)