Back home.

Pick up the pieces.

I’ve done an inventory of sorts, and it’s maybe not so bad.

Not quite so bad.

There’s all of the clothes. I have all of those, I think. Including the uniforms. Not sure how much use they’ll be, but at least they’ll give some sense of context.

Most of the boxes I have are from Aunt Kat’s study. The photo-albums and sketchbooks. Kat’s papers and reports. And also her diaries, which may well be the most important items of all.

A few of the larger boxes from there seem to be histories and technical papers. That’ll help a lot, in linking everything together.

There’s also those research-notes from the conservatory. Not sure how much use they’ll be, either, because they all seem to be referring to the Codex.

Most of which I don’t have any more.

That’s because I’ve got almost nothing from Uncle George’s room – the library.

All those volumes of the Viner-Codex? Other than that one that was in the kitchen, they’re all gone.

The better-known books, the eighteenth-century classics, all the unknown Dickens, the unknown Austens? They’re gone.

That stack of nineteenth-century novels, by people I’d never heard of – especially all those women writers? Gone.

The half-dozen or so book-sized treatises from Ada Lovelace, on the ‘poetic science’ of the Difference Engine? Gone.

All those engineering-references and technical manuals? That set of political-histories that I saw? Gone.

All of the hard-evidence I needed, to explore the detail of that different world? All of that’s gone, too.

There were hundreds of books in there. Hundreds. All of them utterly unique, utterly irreplaceable. But they’re all gone now. All of them. Every one of them.

That’s a huge loss.

Still, make do with what I have, I guess. Nothing else I can do, really.

It’s a start.

It may even be enough.