Beale shook his hand out, trying to massage some feeling back into his fingers after taking notes for the last two hours. The interview with Dorothy Jensen, author of The Children of Darwin, had been illuminating, though incredibly stressful for him. It had been obvious the moment she laid eyes upon him that Lady Ruby had been correct to keep him away from the universe she created, because the sneer on her face hadn’t dropped the entire time she’d been with the team.
Lady Ruby had taken on the role of interviewer, and Beale had to admire how she had walked the line between friendly interview and harsh interrogation on occasion. Regardless of how old Lady Ruby may be, she had made it clear that certain attitudes weren’t going to be tolerated in the Library, and Beale had noticed a couple of sly glances at Joan while she lay down the law. Dorothy didn’t seem to care too much, but at least she managed to avoid any of the more overtly racist terms while she discussed her universe.
And what a universe it was! The report from the Archives hadn’t been enough to prepare Beale for the amount of outright othering of people who weren’t straight, white, and rich was done in the book, but Dorothy made her stance on such people very clear. The “children of Darwin” that her heroes were supposedly civilizing weren’t so much an allegory for the rest of the world as much as a thinly-veiled rant about their lack of humanity. Beale felt a bit of his soul shrivel up with each word of the universe he read, and talking to Dorothy made it even worse.
Lady Ruby, to her credit, did manage to keep the author on the subject of how she found herself in her book, which was the main reason why they had brought her to the Library in the first place. Dorothy’s book had been written in the 1920s, a time in which the walls between the Library and Prime weren’t firmed up as much as they would be in later generations. At the time, while many people in the industrialized world of Prime were literate, reading for pleasure wasn’t something that was done as often or in the volume that it would be in later years; the Head Librarians, therefore, hadn’t thought to seal up the barriers between Prime and the Library as completely.
Dorothy had managed to find her way into the Library first after she had met someone (she refused to name any names) who had come from a fictional universe and made his way into Prime. He had tried to leave without saying goodbye, she said, with the slightest blush to her cheeks - Beale got the impression that he was leaving after the kind of interaction Dorothy’s mother would not have approved of - and so she had followed him.
Beale had always wondered what it must look like to the people in Prime when someone from the Library had gone back to the Library, and now, hearing the way Dorothy described it, he realized that it must be absolutely terrifying - it looked almost like they disappeared into thin air, with the faintest outline of a door around them for a second. (Beale wondered if the door outline was something that remained currently, or if that had been one of the ways the Head Librarians had shored up the walls between the Library and Prime - he would have to ask Veronica when he got back to his team.) Dorothy, showing a single-mindedness that Beale found impressive, if a little frightening, had managed to grab the edge of the door outline and forced herself through before it had completely vanished, which dumped her in to the transit tunnels.
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The tunnels were not made for people who weren’t part of the Library, and Beale knew from experience that the first few times through them felt like being in a maze with next to zero landmarks visible in any way. He could only imagine how Dorothy must have felt, not even being aware that such things existed and suddenly being thrust into them. She said that she had been able to see the “scallywag” (Beale noted the word for himself, because he was determined to work it into conversation at some point - it was simply too good a word to ignore) up ahead of her, and so she kept following him through the twists and turns of the tunnels until he led her to the exit into the Library itself. At that point, even the single-minded Dorothy had been overcome by the sight of the main reading room, and her prey had escaped unscathed. Dorothy, however, was stuck.
Dorothy had spent what felt like an extraordinarily long amount of time describing how she stumbled through the Library, trying to find a way back into Prime, and Beale realized that this said a lot about her style of writing - he’d heard of purple prose before, but he’d never heard someone speaking in it until now. The short version was that she managed to stumble upon a fellow author that she knew in Prime, and he had been able to explain how to get back to Prime and how to find her way back to the Library whenever she wanted. She refused to name him, however, which Lady Ruby seemed to find frustrating. Dorothy had many flaws, but she seemed to be stubbornly loyal toward those she found to be true friends, and Beale had to admire the quality.
After returning to Prime, Dorothy spent some time trying to learn more about the Library, but there wasn’t much information to find. She was also still in the midst of writing The Children of Darwin for the serial magazine, and so she let the obsession with the Library fall by the wayside for a little while as she focused on the things that would bring in income. She seemed almost embarrassed to admit that she had prioritized making money over the intrigue of the Library, and Joan had sneered at the idea, but Beale could understand it. While he didn’t have to worry about such things in his universe - he had one of those vaguely-described jobs that provided him with enough money to pay for all his expenses and then some, but since he never had to go to work in the process of the story, even he didn’t really know what he did for a living - he had heard Sofya and Veronica talk about how difficult it could be to make enough money to cover the day to day costs of living. He could sympathize with a person who needed to put aside an interesting question for the sake of a steady paycheck.
After she had finished writing the book for the magazine, Dorothy had suffered from the magazine’s sudden cancellation before the last installment had been published. She had fortunately been able to start selling short stories to other magazines and so wasn’t completely without an income, but she had felt a deep, emotional tie to The Children of Darwin, and so had felt bereft at the idea that her readers wouldn’t get to see how it was finished. When another publisher had offered her the opportunity to publish the book as a single volume, she had jumped at the chance, even though there had been fine print in the contract that allowed the publisher to make substantive changes to the manuscript. “It wasn’t the book I remembered,” she had said, an ugly look of fury on her face. “They butchered my novel and made it into something no one would recognize.” It hadn’t come as a great surprise to her when the book had not sold. Still, Dorothy had been convinced that the changes had been made deliberately to try and keep her book from selling and making its way to the readers she’d originally captured when the book had been serialized.
It turned out that, as paranoid as Dorothy may have sounded, she was right in this case.
