Sir Pinwell

One winter morning a girl named Inkling came in. She was about eight years old, with a coat too big for her shoulders and hair that wanted to argue with itself. She wanted to find a book about whales but she did not say so. She wandered the shelves picking books up and putting them back in the wrong places.

Pinwell tried very hard not to mind. He was, after all, a librarian.

But after the seventh wrong placement, Inkling reached for a green book wedged between two enormous red volumes. It was a thick book — A History of the Slow Lake — and Inkling tugged at it the way you tug at a stuck drawer.

The book did not budge. She tugged harder. The book held.

"This one's stuck," said Inkling, looking up. "Why won't it come out?"

Pinwell came over slowly, the way he came over to everything. He looked at the green book and at the two red volumes pressing it on either side.

"It can't move," he said.

"Why?"

"Because if it did," said Pinwell, considering his words, "the two big books on either side would fall down. The little book is holding them."

"So I can't ever read it?"

"You can read it," said Pinwell. "You just can't take it. Not while the others are watching."

Inkling thought about this. She was eight years old and she had never thought about a book having to hold up other books before. It seemed unfair. It also seemed interesting.

She sat down on the floor in front of the green book and opened it where it stood. She read about whales. There were no whales in A History of the Slow Lake, but there were eels, which were almost as good. She read for an hour. Pinwell brought her tea, because that is what librarians do.

When she finally went home, she stopped at the door, turned back to him, and said: "Mr. Pinwell, that book is pinned."

The word was new to Pinwell. He had heard pinned before — it was what tailors did with cloth and what botanists did with butterflies — but he had never heard it used to mean held still by what is beside. He turned it over in his quiet mind for the rest of the afternoon.

That evening he took out a small notebook. He drew the green book. He drew the two red ones on either side, larger and slightly looming. He labelled the green one cannot move. He labelled the others holding it still. Then, after some thought, he added a single word at the top of the page: PIN.

Over the next week he walked the rows of his library with the notebook open. He found three more places where one book was pinned by larger neighbours — and one place where it wasn't a book at all, but a small wooden bookmark Pinwell had once left between two volumes, which was now wedged in a way that meant neither volume could be opened without dislodging it. He drew that too. He used Inkling's word, because Inkling's word was correct.

He did not know yet that chess players used the same word. He did not know that bishops, in particular, were rather good at making this pattern happen — that a bishop standing on a long diagonal could pin a knight against a queen, and the knight could not move without losing the queen. He did not know any of that. He simply noticed.

Three winters passed. The handbook of insects was still wedged between the two atlases. The green book had been read by Inkling four times, always while seated on the floor.

On the morning of the fourth winter, the door of the library opened and a chunky cheerful rook in a brass-buttoned waistcoat walked in.

The rook looked around at the rows. He nodded slowly, as if at something he had hoped to find. He said his name was Captain Castle. He said he had heard there was a librarian in the Slow Lake village who could see pins in books that no one else could see.

Pinwell put down his cup of tea. He thought, very briefly, about what one says in moments like these.

"I suppose," he said, "I should bring my notebook."

The chessboard, Pinwell discovered, was much like the library — only the rows were shorter, and the pieces moved instead of staying put.

He met his first class of children at the academy on a Tuesday. Captain Castle introduced him as the librarian who sees pins, which Pinwell felt was a little dramatic but did not correct. The children watched him in the way children watch a person they are not yet sure about. One of them — a small fox in a green scarf — had brought her own notebook, which Pinwell appreciated.

He set up the position himself, slowly. A white bishop on c4. A black knight on f6. A black queen on h8, sitting tall behind the knight.

"Consider this knight," said Pinwell. He did not raise his voice. The children leaned in slightly without knowing they were doing it. "The knight is allowed to move. There are several places it could go. It would like, in particular, to go to e4 — where it could threaten the bishop."

A child in the front said, "So it'll go there?"

"It would like to," said Pinwell. "But it cannot."

"Why not?"

"Because of what is behind it."

He pointed, very slowly, to the queen. The children's eyes followed.

"If the knight moves," he said, "the bishop will see all the way down the diagonal — and there is the queen, three times the knight's value, with nothing in between. The knight cannot move without losing the queen."

The room was quiet for a moment.

The fox with the notebook said, "So the knight is doing a job by not moving?"

Pinwell considered this. He liked the way she had said it.

"Yes," he said. "Exactly that. The knight is holding the queen up. Like a small book holding two larger books still."

The fox wrote small book holding two larger books still in her notebook, and underlined it. Captain Castle, watching from the corner with his hands clasped behind his back, decided then and there that the partnership was going to work.