The archive at St Cuthbert's was in the basement under the old library, and it smelled of dust and cold stone and, faintly, of pear drops, which Selena Hart eventually worked out was the smell of film negatives dying quietly in the dark.
There were nine hundred boxes.
She had been given a trestle table, an anglepoise lamp with a broken elbow that she had fixed with a rubber band on the second day, a laptop, and a key. She had also been given a sheet of A4 by Miss Gale on the first morning, on which was printed, in a typeface that had gone out of use some time around 1974:
THE FOUNDERS' AWARD. Terms of tenure.
The Scholar shall be resident in College for the whole of the Long Vacation.
The Scholar shall undertake such work in the College Archive as the Archivist shall direct.
The Scholar shall not remove any material from the Archive.
The Scholar shall report weekly to the Archivist.
It was a good deal. It was, in fact, an absurd deal — fees, accommodation, a stipend that meant she did not have to do eleven hours a week at the Co-op in term time like everybody else she knew — and Selena had read those four lines about ninety times in the six months since the letter came, waiting for the catch, and had never found one.
She got to box four on the Thursday afternoon.
Boxes one to three had been minute books, which are exactly as interesting as they sound. Box four was photographs, and photographs are the reason people do this job: hundreds of them, loose, unlabelled, sepia and then grey and then, at the very bottom, appallingly colour.
She laid them out in rows and started dating them by the collars.
Rowing eight, 1901. It said so on the back in brown ink. Eight young men and a cox on the steps of the boathouse in the white kit of a hundred and twenty years ago, arms folded, all of them doing the thing that people did in photographs then, which was to look at the camera as though it might go off.
Except one.
Third from the left, at the back. He was looking very slightly to the left of the lens, with his chin down, and while everyone else in that photograph was holding a face on, he simply had one. He looked, Selena thought, like a man waiting for something tedious to be over.
She looked at him for about four seconds and then put the photograph on the pile and picked up the next one.
She came back to it forty minutes later, and she was never able to explain why.
She had got as far as 1938 by then — a group on the same boathouse steps in the same kit, thirty-seven years on, twelve of them this time, all in a row.
Second from the right.
Selena Hart put the two photographs side by side on the trestle table under an anglepoise lamp held together with a rubber band, and looked from one to the other for a long time.
Then she got out her phone and photographed both of them, which was, she realised later, technically a breach of clause four.