THE UNABRIDGED MARGINALIA

A Foreword, in Small Print

Our Order catalogued everything and, in the fullness of centuries, forgot how to do anything else. We cannot fight, farm, govern, or reliably feed ourselves, but we can annotate, and so annotation is the whole of our remaining usefulness to the realm. This book is that usefulness. The body of every official record in this castle is written large, confident, and false; the truth of it survives only in the margins, in the footnotes, in the small cramped type that the confident never stoop to read. I have spent my life down there in the small type. It is damp, and honest, and mine.

I am aware that I cannot finish a thought without three smaller ones climbing out of it. I have made my peace with this.¹ Each entry: the Record, as sanctioned above — and beneath it, the truth, in the notes, where it is allowed to live.

¹ I have not, in fact, made my peace with this; I have made three separate peaces with it, and they are presently at war.

1On the Lordship

> The Record. “Percival Bastable, Forty-Fourth Lord of that name, in unbroken and glorious succession.”

¹ Twenty-seventh.

² The count went astray in the matter of the roof, of which more below. A house that keeps losing its roof tends, in the confusion, to mislay a lord or two along with it.

³ Three times the family lost the roof; twice they lost the tally of lords with it; and once — I have this from a ledger that has since declined to go on existing — they added nine to the number on purpose, on the stated grounds that “Forty-Fourth sounds like a dynasty, whereas Twenty-Seventh sounds like an accident that kept happening.”

⁴ Sister Footnote reminds Footnote that editorial commentary is beneath the dignity of the Order. Footnote reminds Sister Footnote that they are the same woman, that it is two o'clock in the morning, and that nobody else is ever going to read this far.

⁵ Add a digit to your name and the world looks at your crown. Lose the roof, and it looks at your head.

2On the Founding

> The Record. “In the year 1478 the castle passed to Sir Reginald Bastable by a friendly game of cards, honourably played and graciously won.”

¹ Not friendly.

² Not honourably.

³ The other player was a Baron, whose name the record has been permitted to keep and whose everything else it has not; by the small hours he had lost his lands, his deed, and — the large print omits this, as the large print omits all the interesting parts — his life, in water not far from where he had lately kept his foundations.

⁴ The deck has never been found. I have looked. The restricted archive permits me to look; it is becoming clear that it does not intend to permit me to conclude.

⁵ I had set down the seventh word of the true account when the shelf beneath me rose some two inches and the lamp put itself out. When it relit, this note ended where you see it end, in a hand I am no longer certain is

⁶ — the shelf will not let me finish this note. I have stopped trying. One learns, in this archive, the difference between a secret that is kept and a secret that keeps itself.

⁷ A record is only as honest as the walls will allow — and these particular walls have a very great deal to lose.

3On House Haver

> The Record. “House Haver, of the East Wing, in good standing; taxes paid in full and on time; the annual Goose Tournament held without interruption these three hundred years.”

¹ I have attempted, as duty requires, to cite the East Wing. The citation has no referent. The wing is not on any survey; the surveys are not wrong; the wing is simply not there, and also pays its tax by the quarter, punctually, in coin that clears.

² I wrote to House Haver requesting formal confirmation of its existence, for the completeness of the record. It replied by return, in an excellent and confident hand: “Certainly not.”

³ I have filed the reply as evidence. I have not yet decided of what.

⁴ Some sources decline to be cited. The scholarly response is to leave a blank of exactly their shape — and then, whatever you do, never poke it.

4On the Thursday Soup

> The Record. “The Thursday soup is wholesome, traditional, and beloved of all.”

¹ It is cursed.

² It is not cursed; my predecessor wrote “cursed” in the margin in the year 1712, and the kitchen has been far too proud to alter either the recipe or the rumour in the two centuries since.

³ Two hundred years of a feud conducted entirely in the margin of a single menu, each cook answering the last in a smaller hand. I have now added my own note, and in doing so have joined the feud, and become the thing I catalogue. None of us, it turns out, is above the small type.

⁴ Every institution is only a disagreement that outlived everyone who remembered what it was about.