Chapter One
The Trade Behind the Bridge
The books arrived by water, which was fitting, since the water was what had hurt them.
On the first Monday of the story a boat brought Livia Ferro the drowned library of a dead notary: four crates, two hundred years of a family's paper, soaked in last spring's flood and then, worse, dried wrong, in a locked apartment, over a slow summer, so that what came across the steps into her workshop was not wet books but warped ones, cockled, blocked, their pages fused into wooden wedges, which is the harder rescue, the way it is harder to mend a bone that has set crooked.
She worked the first crate with the patience that was the whole trade. A drowned book cannot be hurried; it must be taken back through its drowning: humidified until the salt lets go, washed leaf by leaf in trays of clean water, the sea coaxed out of the fibres, pressed, dried on lines like small pale laundry, collated, resewn on the frame her great grandfather had built, and returned to boards. A book a week, when the book was kind. A book a season, when it was not.
The workshop around her had not changed in a century because it had no reason to: the great bench scarred like a butcher's block, the nipping presses in their row, the wall of hand tools each in its painted shadow, the smell of paste and leather and clean water, and on its own oak stand by the window, where the light fell first, the Book of Returns.
