She listened to his breathing become slow and regular. When he began to snore, a low, gentlemanly snore, she gently, ever so gently, extracted herself from under his arm and slid off the feather mattress. The thick Persian carpet tickled her toes; it was deeper and softer than any of the carpets in her own tiny apartment.

Bookcases covered one entire wall. This was, in a very technical sense, Baronet Mistry’s study, though the Baronet was not known for his study habits. His father had been a notable academic and collector of antique volumes, but the current Baronet’s only contribution to the collection had been the addition of the daybed on which he currently slumbered.

Gulmina Kincaid stood naked before the twenty high wall of books and imagined that she felt the knowledge of the ancients gently blowing off them, their cold exhalations in time with the Baronet’s rather more earthy sounds.

Some of the books on these shelves were a thousand years old.

Though she had dedicated her life to the New Alexandrian, the sight of these books — their very form, knowledge and wisdom packaged neatly and available for anyone to thumb through — the sight stirred her.

The volume she was looking for was small and off-white; the cover was rawhide, very stiff, and old, so old that the gold leaf which had originally spelled out the title of the volume along its spine had long since flaked away.

She had seen it a couple of hours ago; it had practically leapt out at her, when she was whisked through this room on the arm of the Baronet’s wife as part of the guided tour which had ended, predictably, in the big bedroom upstairs, with the Baronet’s wife, the Baronet, and a friend of theirs from one of the fox-hunting clubs.

Gulmina had been game, of course, because not being game would mean that her welcome ran out rather quickly, but the entire time she had kept the image of that small, creamy-white volume in her mind.

And now here she was, six hours and a great deal of activity later and well after midnight, standing before the tall shelves, and the damned thing was not where she had left it.

Or rather… she thought it was not where she left it. She was familiar with the phenomenon whereby a sought-after object remains exactly where one left it, and yet ones mental image of the spot somehow… drifts, so that when one eventually finds the sought object, it is exactly where one expected it, and yet was not where one was looking…

She let her eyes lose focus a little bit, taking in the entire shelf, letting herself simply stand there, the sweat of the evening’s exertions dry on her skin but still cold in the slight breeze that really was coming off the bookcase. She cocked her head to one side. How did…

There it was. Letting her mind wander onto the workings of the house’s ventilation system did the trick, and she suddenly had the little white volume, exactly where she’d thought it was, but somehow not where she was looking.

She stopped and took a deep breath before reaching out, gently, and sliding the little volume out of its resting place. Paying close attention to the Baronet’s breathing, she found her clothes, most of which were in a single pile on the floor, and quickly removed an identical white volume from the pocket sewn into the inside of her corset.

It was as close as she’d been able to make it, working only from descriptions that were thirty years old and not at all reliable on their face, but she had to admit that what she’d ended up creating was a surprisingly reasonable facsimile.

Not that the current Baronet Mistry would notice at all. The fake was mostly intended to occupy what might otherwise have been a noticeable gap.

She put the real volume into the special pocket in her corset and replaced the fake, being careful to leave it to rest perfectly within the dust-shadow left by its original.

And then she was done, and free to gather her clothing and sneak away or to wake the Baronet for another round — he was, after all, an appealing figure of a man, possibly owing to his complete lack of interest in intellectual pursuits.

But the mystery of the breeze coming through the bookcase drew her, and a bare few moments search found a switch, poorly concealed in a bit of carved nature scene decorating the wooden bookcases.

When she turned it, there was a click, and a small section of the wall of books swung in, revealing a stone staircase going down.

The Baronet spluttered in his sleep and then, as she held her breath, resumed his gentle snoring.

She exhaled, carefully, quietly, and then, gathering her clothing together but not pausing to put it on, she took a candle from the bedside table and walked through the secret door in the bookcase, trying not to panic as it swung shut behind her.