Most of the shops near the Town House were closed. Ben lingered at a bookstall, his eye caught by a row of titles on the bottom shelf of an outdoor rack, his mind disturbed by the sudden partial clarification of a memory. That noon Reuben had certainly been trying to tell him something. Not that he was ill—Ru had really been exasperated at that notion—but it did have to do with Mr. Welland. Ben importuned his memory for his brother's words. "He knows so much ... to study ... if I might...."
A call? All of a sudden Ru wished to study medicine? Ben squatted before the books—certainly medical, and mostly Latin—and the guess acquired confidence until Ben was fretting at his own stupidity: the boy could hardly have meant anything else.
"Harvard, sir?" asked the bookseller from the doorway, a squatty man who must have been nobly redheaded in his prime.
"Not yet. This autumn, probably." (Why did I say that?—no probably about it, when Uncle John says I shall, and I can't disappoint him.)
"I know the look, sir. Closing soon, but don't be hurried, look about.... Student of medicine?"
"Not I, sir, but my brother is a learned man of divers interests." Intending it as a jest for private enjoyment, Ben felt no impulse to chuckle at the pompous utterance. Not even a lie—oh, not a man maybe, if one must be precise about chronology; but not exactly a boy either.
"Ah!... All sixpence on that shelf except the one from Oxford. For that I must have two shillings—'t a'n't badly worn, you see."
Immediately desiring it, Ben sniffed. It was in English, not Latin—Anatomy of Human Bodies, published in 1698, only nine years ago. Ben turned the pages. The flayed and dissected subjects in the copper engravings wore a look both rigidly embarrassed and amused. How unlike Charity's naked swallows! And yet how like them too, for these artists, with the coolness of great skill, were certainly trying to convey——("What is truth?" said John Kenny.) Ben sniffed again. "Some pages gone."
"I know. Two shillings is cheap all the same."
"Why, damme, suppose my brother wishes to know the very things told of in these lost pages?"