by Lev Grossman
“At the time I had only the vaguest memory of who you were, but somehow the Duke figured out that we went to college together, and he had the idea we were best buddies. Anyway, he told me Blanche had hired you to find this book, and that I was supposed to invite you to this party I was having. To make sure you were there—he was pretty emphatic on that point. Somebody was going to meet you there. But you didn’t show.”
“Yeah. Sorry. Short notice.”
Fabrikant pushed his plate away and leaned forward confidentially.
“He’s a very strange guy, Edward. I’d drop him as a client if I could, but he’s too rich, and we need the money.” A cloud of worry crossed his fresh, unlined face. “I’m trying to get InTech off the ground. There’s no VC anywhere. I’m two months away from missing payroll here. But you—I don’t get it. What’s the point? You don’t need him. You’re set. You’re golden. And you’re getting caught up in something that could fuck up your career in a very serious way. It just doesn’t make sense.”
Edward hedged.
“What’s the big deal?” He tried a chuckle. “It’s just a bunch of books, right?”
“Exactly my point,” Fabrikant said. “Think about it. How much is one book worth to you? Why not get out now?”
“I am out. What more does he want from me?” A note of huffiness crept into Edward’s voice. “How much further out can I get?”
“Further. A lot further. Look, just think about it. That’s all I’m asking.”
Edward was silent for a minute, rubbing his chin, defiantly not thinking about it. The whole subject was uncannily resistant to serious, sober, analytical thought of any kind. Edward had the impression that Fabrikant wasn’t so much concerned about him anyway. It was more that the very idea of somebody not acting in their own professional self-interest was offensive to his sensibilities, a blasphemy against his personal creed of greed.
Gauging his moment perfectly, a passing waiter paused long enough to whisk both their plates away. When the check arrived, shockingly large, they argued over who would pay, and to his surprise Edward won. He kept the receipt, told himself he’d find some way to expense it later. They walked out together.
The power breakfast crowd was just beginning to thin out. Nine-to-fivers and shoppers charged past them, heads lowered, already laden with briefcases and bags from Barneys and Bloomingdale’s and Crate & Barrel. The ordinary commerce of ordinary people. Edward considered the distinct possibility that he might go back to bed when he got home. He and Fabrikant squinted at each other appraisingly in the bright sunlight that sparkled off the polished door handles of parked cars and the stainless steel implements on display in the windows of Restoration Hardware and Williams-Sonoma.
“So you really don’t know what this is all about?” Fabrikant said. “Why he’s so worked up about that book, or whatever it is?”
Edward shrugged.
“It’s probably worth a lot of money.”
“Is it?”
“Isn’t it?”
“It’d have to be worth a hell of a lot,” said Fabrikant, “for them to care this much.”
“Six figures. Maybe more.”
Fabrikant snorted derisively.
“I’m surprised at you,” he said. His concerned look came back, and this time Edward wondered if Fabrikant might actually pity him. “This really is all you know, isn’t it? I thought you were a pro at this stuff, but you’re just an amateur. You’re worse than I am.”
He shook his head sadly. It wasn’t meant as an insult, and Edward found that he didn’t particularly resent it.
“Look, just try to watch out for yourself,” Fabrikant said. “And whatever you do, stay away from the Duchess.”
“I thought you said you never met her.”
“I haven’t. And I never, ever want to. You know she has a reputation?”
“What kind of reputation?” Edward asked numbly, feeling more and more like he was out of the loop, that he’d missed the meeting, was flying blind.
“She eats guys like us alive.” Fabrikant winked broadly. “For breakfast.”
He turned away, squaring his broad shoulders and thrusting his hands into his pockets, which made him look even more dashing than ever, if possible.
14
THE NEXT DAY Edward and Margaret left the city.
They took the West Side Highway uptown until it became Route 9A, which runs north out of Manhattan along the Hudson River. The further north they drove the faster the traffic moved and the thinner it got, and soon they were racing at highway speeds past the monumental facades of Riverside Drive apartment buildings, then past Grant’s Tomb, with cloverleaf exits peeling off east into Harlem and north into the Bronx. A perfect little red tugboat bobbed around in the water under the George Washington bridge, looking exactly like a bath toy.
The car was a rental car—a cheap, snazzy, green Ford Contour, not much more than a stereo on wheels—but Edward loved to drive, and he didn’t get to do it very often. He rolled down the window, weaving and fighting for position with the other drivers, and thought about nothing at all. It was a relief to get out of the city. Breakfast with Fabrikant had been an awkward reminder of all the responsibilities he was neglecting, not to mention a warning of future difficulties to come, but now he almost managed to forget about them again, or at least to section them off in a carefully quarantined area of his brain where his thoughts never went without strict supervision.
It was a perfect, golden summer day. The air was hot and dry, and the road swooped breathlessly up and down the steep side of the Hudson Valley. He drove it like a race course, but Margaret didn’t seem to mind. They took a lumpy old macadam highway through Van Cortlandt Park, a three-laner worn slick and shiny with age. The morning sun shone down through the pollen-dusted air, through the leaves of giant prehistoric trees that leaned out from the hillside over the road, flourishing on the carbon dioxide released by the millions of breathing humans nearby.
Margaret looked blankly out the window, not talking, lost in her own thoughts. There was less hostility between them now after the day spent in the Wents’ apartment. There was a bond of amiable resignation—nothing shared, nothing exchanged, but a tacit, temporary acceptance of their odd-couple partnership. She wore a blue and green plaid skirt and blue stockings. She couldn’t seem to fit her long legs comfortably under the dashboard.
“Who would name a town Fresh Kills?” said Edward for no reason as they passed a road sign.
“‘Fresh creeks.’ ‘Kill’ means ‘creek’ in Dutch.”
“Why’d they put this place all the way upstate in Old Forge anyway? The Annex, I mean.”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you go up there a lot?”
She shook her head.
“The Annex doesn’t have much that interests me. No significant medieval holdings. It’s mostly just a repository for the Hazlitt papers, of which there are several hundred feet, and for overflow storage. I went up once or twice back when I worked at the main library, on business.”
She looked out the window again. Edward expected her to fall silent, but she didn’t.
“I wanted to tell you something,” she said. “I’ve been doing some work on the pressmarks in the Duke’s library.”
“Pressmarks?”
“Call numbers. Most private libraries don’t use a standard classification like the Dewey decimal, they have their own unique filing systems, made up by the owner more or less arbitrarily. Librarians call them pressmarks. Each bookpress—bookcase—has a name or a number assigned to it, or a letter, or a Roman emperor, or a part of the body, or what have you. They can be quite idiosyncratic. Did you read The Name of the Rose?”
“Saw the movie. Sean Connery. Christian Slater.”
Margaret refrained from comment.
“In the Wents’ system each bookpress is named after an Arthurian knight: Lancelot, Galahad, Gawain, Bors, and so on. I’ve been able to figure out where just about everything used to be, o
riginally. But there are some interesting gaps.”
She passed him a piece of paper. He glanced down at it, caught a glimpse of a fearsomely complicated diagram in colored pencils, and handed it back.
“I’ll take your word for it.”
“It’s a rough map of the library’s original layout. Missing books are marked in red. Most of a whole bookcase is gone, here, and a few scattered volumes here and here. If it comes to that, we can learn more about these two by looking at the books on either side of them—they probably left traces of their covers behind. I’ve also been rereading the text of the Viage. The eighteenth-century fragments.”
Edward kept his eyes on the road.
“All right.”
“There’s something—” She hesitated. A moment of fierce internal struggle ensued, which she quietly but decisively lost.
“There’s a certain amount of evidence, both linguistic and historical evidence, that might suggest—if one were to interpret it that way—the possible existence of an older precursor text to Forsyth’s version of the Viage.”
After that short speech she straightened up primly in her seat, like a nun who had been forced to refer, however euphemistically, to something obscene. She fixed her eyes on a point directly in front of her. Edward recognized this as a sign that she was getting ready to lecture, and it was.
“From a linguistic point of view, the text looks like a fake. Why? Because it’s not written in the Middle English of Chaucer or of the Pearl Poet. English varied a lot from place to place in the fourteenth century, but the Viage doesn’t sound like any kind of medieval English I’ve ever come across. It sounds more like a half-educated eighteenth-century hack doing his best impression of what he thinks fourteenth-century English should sound like.
“But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the publisher, Forsyth, wasn’t working from a genuine fourteenth-century source text. Even if he did have one, he wouldn’t have followed it very closely. More likely he would have translated it into modern English, badly, and then added whatever archaic touches he thought were necessary to make it sound ‘authentically’ medieval—more authentic, for his purposes, than the real Middle English text. Like a novelization of a movie based on a novel.”
“So you’re saying there’s no way to tell.”
“I’m not saying that at all.”
She reached into the back seat, rummaged in her leather bag, and took out a thick volume with a plain library binding: pine green with a white call number stamped on the spine. Its edges were frilled with yellow stickies.
“Listen.” She opened the book and ruthlessly cracked the spine. “Although the Middle English of the Viage is bad, it’s not quite as bad as it should be. There are echoes of something authentic in the meter. In Middle English you generally pronounce silent e’s, and a lot of the lines here scan better with the silent e’s pronounced. It could be just a nice archaic touch—except that in 1718, when the Viage was published, no one knew how to pronounce Middle English correctly. They just thought Chaucer wrote unmetrical poetry and couldn’t spell very well.”
“Good. I like it. I’m sold.”
“There’s more.” She brushed back a strand of hair and kept flipping through the book.
“Take this phrase: ‘the kyng Priamus sone of Troye.’ What the narrator means is, ‘King Priam of Troy’s son,’ or ‘the son of King Priam of Troy,’ but he doesn’t say that, he has ‘King Priam’s son of Troy.’ You see the difference? The grammar is pure Middle English: The object of the possessive comes before the genitive modifier. Only a scholar would have known that, and Forsyth, whatever else he may have been, was no scholar. He couldn’t possibly have gotten it right. He couldn’t possibly.”
Edward smiled.
“You’re arguing my side now.”
“I know.” She crossed her arms exasperatedly and slouched down in the seat, putting one knee up against the glove compartment and staring at it.
“So what if we’re right? Why don’t you write something about it? An article or something? Isn’t that what you people do?”
She laughed at this, exactly once: “Ha. I’d be laughed out of the profession.”
“Well, we’ll clear everything up tonight, if it’s there.”
She nodded.
“If it’s there.”
They were on a narrow two-lane highway now, loosely following the Hudson River north into Washington Irving country —pine-infested towns with names like Tarrytown and Sleepy Hollow perched on the steep sides of the Hudson Valley. Neighborhoods of rich old colonial homes alternated with tiny prefabricated houses in bad pastel colors, with gazing balls in the garden and Camaros on the lawn wrapped in blue tarps.
Edward cleared his throat.
“You said one of the bookshelves was missing,” he prompted. “In the library.”
Margaret didn’t answer immediately. After her brief spell of talkativeness she’d lapsed back into her usual melancholy affect. She toyed unconsciously with a strand of seed pearls around her neck, the only jewelry she wore.
“Sir Urre,” she said, after a while. “That’s what the shelf was labeled. The missing one.”
“Urre? What kind of name is that?”
“Hungarian. He was a very minor knight. He didn’t even make the Round Table until late in the game, which makes his inclusion in the cataloging scheme a little strange.”
“I didn’t even know Hungarians could be knights,” said Edward. “If he wasn’t a knight of the Round Table, who was he? Some kind of freelancer? A minor leaguer?”
“Malory wrote about him. Sir Thomas Malory was a very strange man, a knight who wrote mostly from prison, where he landed for looting and raping and pillaging, but he was also one of the greatest natural prose stylists who ever lived. It was Malory who stitched together the various French Grail legends into a single English masterpiece, the Morte D’Arthur.
“As a knight, Sir Urre only had one moment of glory, and even that wasn’t very glorious. He was cursed—he’d received some wounds in a duel, seven of them, and the curse (as administered by his opponent’s mother) stated that the wounds wouldn’t heal until they’d been touched by the best knight in the world.”
“And that was—?”
“Well, that’s the question, isn’t it? Sir Urre came to visit Arthur’s court. There was a contest to see who could heal him. It was all for Sir Urre’s benefit, in theory, but of course the knights just saw it as a convenient way of figuring out who the best knight in the world was. Anyway, he was carried out on a kind of portable pavilion with bees on the curtains—that was his coat of arms, a golden bee—so that all the different knights could take their shot at healing him. Everybody expected Sir Lancelot to win, because he was the local hero, but only Lancelot knew that he couldn’t win, because he was a sinner—he’d slept with a woman named Elaine, and he was sleeping with Arthur’s wife, Guinevere, and he was probably prideful on top of that.
“So all the knights lined up to try, and they all failed, and finally it was Lancelot’s turn. Lancelot knew he would fail, too, and his sinfulness would be revealed, but he had no choice. He had to try anyway.”
It was getting hot inside the car, and Edward rolled up the windows and groped around on the dashboard for the AC. Margaret reached over and punched it for him.
“Now here’s the twist,” she said. “When Sir Lancelot laid hands on Sir Urre, the wounds did heal. God had forgiven Lancelot and allowed him to perform his miracle. Nobody else was surprised, but of course Lancelot knew what had happened, he knew that God had spared him when He could have humiliated him. He could never be the best knight in the world, but God had allowed him to pretend, just for a minute, that he was. It was too much for him, and he started to cry. ‘And ever Sir Lancelot wept,’ says Malory, ‘as he had been a child that had been beaten.’”
Edward swerved the Contour around a dead branch lying in the road.
“It worked out pretty well for Sir Urre, anyway,” he said. “What do
you think it means that they named the bookshelf after him?”
“Who knows?” Margaret smiled a tight, private little smile. “It makes a good story. Not everything means something, you know.”
With that she closed her eyes, squared her slender shoulders, and promptly and efficiently fell asleep.
It had been a long time since Edward ventured out of the city—weeks, months, he couldn’t even remember the last time—and the green fermented smell of grass and fields and hay and sap was like a warm bath. His eyes watered, and he enjoyed a satisfying sneeze. Everything looked more vivid in the natural sunlight, unobstructed by skyscrapers and power lines: finer, clearer, with exciting textures and superior cinematography. In the distance the rock cliffs on the far side of the Hudson were a rich, old, wrinkled red. The sky was cloudless except for one decorative feathered wisp. They whipped past corn shacks, rural churches, general stores, a dilapidated warehouse with a sandy front lot half full of rusting old plow blades, abandoned by their snowplows.
Edward looked over at Margaret. Her pale, sleeping profile was perfectly silhouetted against the green blur of the landscape: her long, swooping nose, her downturned mouth, her elegant neck, pale with one tiny brown mole. She was wearing her customary T-shirt-and-cardigan uniform, even in the summer heat. A tender, protective feeling came over him. He would watch over her while she slept.
Eventually he turned off Route 87 onto 116, crossing the river on a high iron bridge that arched up over the blue water. He pulled up at a red light, and Margaret sensed they’d stopped and opened her eyes. She pushed her glasses up onto her forehead and covered her face with her hands.
“I’m sorry,” she said through her fingers. “I must have fallen asleep.”
“That’s good,” said Edward. “You’ll need it for tonight.”
“Yes.”