They found the cartulary in box six hundred and forty-four in the second week of July.
It was in the wrong series, filed as estate papers, exactly as she had been told at ten past midnight on the tenth of June by a woman who was in the process of becoming dust: the whole of the mediaeval cartulary of St Cuthbert's College, four hundred and eleven documents, the earliest dated 1341, which no scholar had seen since 1963 and which four separate people had spent careers assuming was lost in a fire in 1802.