The Pearl Device
A foundation in Geneva that prefers its archives unread. A pearl device that appears in no catalogue. A retired history teacher who has learned, by now, that the third reader is the one who matters.
About the book
A third envelope arrives in Marblehead from the Hellenic Ministry of Culture, this one forwarded — with apologies — by a Genevan foundation that does not, as a matter of policy, forward anything. It contains a single sheet of headed stationery, a citation in a hand Martha Bancroft has not seen for a quarter of a century, and a footnote referring to an object the foundation does not, officially, own. The object is described as a pearl device. The foundation would prefer that Martha not ask which one.
Martha has by now learned to recognise the particular silence of an institution that intends to outlive its own questions. She travels to Geneva because the alternative is to let the foundation outlive her own. What she finds in the alpine archive — and what she does not find — is the matter of the third book in The Footnote Mysteries.
A passage
The foundation's reading room was small, panelled in a wood Martha could not name, and lit by a window which gave onto an oblique slope of pine. A clerk had set the box on the table with both hands and had then declined to remain in the room. The box was the colour of an old book — the colour, Martha thought, of the books one inherits from people who have died apologetically. She took off her gloves and set them beside her left hand. She did not open the box.
— from The Pearl Device (Chapter Three)