“Because that isn’t who Slader is,” he said. “Be like asking a vampire to spend a day at the shore, sunbathing. Not in his nature.”
“But you’ll happily go meet this pathological vampire for a drink?”
“Not happily. Just, let’s say, unavoidably,” sitting down and blowing on his coffee. “Let’s eat, please.”
“I want to know what was in the package.”
“Honestly, I’d rather not show you. But it’s in our house now.”
Outside, the rain was finally beginning to taper off. Through the back windows I could see skeins of mist lifting off the wide field that led down to a curtain of second-growth trees ranging along the perimeter of our land. Beyond that were tumbledown drystone walls that early farmers, who originally owned sizable swaths of this county, had built after they cleared meadows from rock-strewn forests. Everything was glistening, like diamonds winking in the greenery. On normal days, no matter how distressed I was—whether it was some problem at the bookshop, with one of the girls, even with Will—I found I could look out on this expanse of rolling grassy earth, stretch my eyes, and recenter myself. Even today, fraught as matters were, I gazed down at the meadow in search of calm.
One of our wisest decisions when we reverse-emigrated from America to Ireland, twenty years ago this summer, was really a nondecision. While we’d incrementally divested ourselves of most of our possessions—Will, his many books; me, my bookshop—we hadn’t gotten rid of this farmhouse, which had been his late parents’ cherished retreat. On a long-term lease to the family of one of his father’s closest business associates and friends, the property had brought us a steady monthly income. Besides, Will felt it would have been a betrayal to them, as well as his father’s memory, to attempt eviction and list the place. When, about a decade ago, the Cunningham family had begun to disperse and, well, die off, we found ourselves in a position to take it over again. Will, who loved little better than to restore, renovate, and revive, had spent every possible waking hour away from his job in the city working on the house. Other than a few family heirlooms, including several of his mother’s watercolors, my Augustus John drawing in a gilt frame, and an ultrarare literary artifact—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s own fountain pen, inherited from Will’s collector father and given to Nicole on her sixteenth birthday—this was pretty much all that remained from earlier days. And, for my part, long after disposing of my own childhood bungalow in Montauk after the murder of my brother, I made this getaway mine too. Yes, we considered ourselves New Yorkers, city folk. But each of us felt most comfortable in our own skin when we were here.
The sun had begun to peek out as we finished breakfast. Time had come to see what was in the parcel. As we walked down a corridor from the kitchen, past the mudroom in back, toward the studio, Will said, “I hope you’ll forgive me for stating the obvious, but it’s important that none of us mention a word of this to a soul. Nobody, not a hint of it to anyone. Can we agree on that?”
Maisie and I assented, she more readily than her mother. Being asked to enter into a pact of secrecy only raised my suspicions. Some toxic old sentiments fought to rise to the surface, but I tamped them down.
“We’ll tell Nicole when she comes,” he added. “Goes unsaid.”
An addition to the house—once Will’s father’s lair, outfitted with leather club chairs, antique rolltop desk, stacking mahogany bookcases—had been converted into a small-press printing studio that Will shared with Nicole, who passed many productive hours with him here whenever she was upstate, helping with one of his, or rather their, projects.
Back in Ireland, when apprenticing at Eccles & Sons’ stationery and print shop in tiny Kenmare, Will fell in love with letterpress printing, a skill he developed over the years, one that nearly matched his staggering, if troubled, talent as a calligrapher. When we settled into the farmhouse, he rolled up his sleeves, joined by Nicole, who’d learned the gentle art of letterpress printing at the elbow of her craftsman father. Together, they dedicated themselves to hand typesetting and printing limited-edition fine press chapbooks, which they sold under the imprint Stone Circle Editions, named in honor of the Bronze Age stone circle known as the Shrubberies in Kenmare. A pair of gifted obsessives, they made just enough from these sales to buy more ink, paper, and other supplies. So it was that Will’s father’s club chairs came to be replaced by a Vandercook proof press. Where the rolltop desk once stood was now home to a pair of large vintage Hamilton cabinets filled with various fonts of metal type. Where before his father had stored first-edition rarities in glass-front bookcases, industrial metal shelves now housed cans of printer’s inks, tympan paper, press oils, and the like. There were objects as large as a beautiful Jacques board shear they bought at an auction in the Berkshires and as small as intricate little reglets, quoins, and loupes. And paper, lots of drawers choked with a full-blown menagerie of paper. While my engagement with books had always been as a reader, learner, buyer, and seller, I’d never felt compelled to make a book. Marveling at their workshop—their biblio-laboratory, as Nicole called it—I sometimes wished it were otherwise.
He also kept his calligraphy pens and inks here, but rarely if ever used them anymore. Knowing his forgery days were behind him, I once asked Will why not throw that stuff out or give it to Nicole? “You’re like a recovering alcoholic keeping a stock of favorite liquors around.” He said he wasn’t thirsty, and not to worry about it. For the most part, I didn’t.
I suppose I should not have been surprised that Will had locked Slader’s package in his fireproof safe overnight. But I was surprised by what, with the great delicacy only a person who has handled rare books and manuscripts his whole life displays, he pulled from the heavy-card mailer. Swaddled in tissue, which Will neatly unfolded and set aside, was a drab, nondescript pamphlet, a bit the worse for wear. The kind of ephemeral detritus most people would recycle with yellowed newspapers and outdated catalogs, or else use to line the bottom of a tiny birdcage. Its edges were somewhat tattered and its tea-colored cover was lightly spotted along the bottom with what looked like old water stains. At about half a dozen inches tall and maybe four and a half across, it was altogether unmemorable.
Neither Maisie nor I said a word when Will, whose own anxious eyes were dancing, looked up from the artifact and said, “Well?”
There was no reason Maisie should have known what her father was so restless, even edgy, about. As for me, early American literature—this was printed in Boston in 1827 by some Calvin F. S. Thomas, so stated on the front cover—was outside my usual province. Had it been an early recipe book or art monograph, then maybe. But I’d never seen this before and said as much to Will.
“Neither have I,” he replied. “At least one that’s not in captivity.”
“Institutionalized, in a library,” I explained to Maisie.
He carefully turned it over, and on the rear cover, framed by a border of repeated triangular ornaments, like stylized burnt conifers or ink-black sunrises, similar to that on the front, was an advertisement for “Book & Job Printing” by that same “Calvin Thomas of No. 70, Washington-Street, Boston, Corner of State Street.” There was no indication on either front or back of who the author of this dreary-looking little chapbook, titled Tamerlane and Other Poems, was, aside from his or her being a Bostonian.
“Tamerlane,” Will said, a tone of uncommon impatience cascading from high to low with those three syllables. “No chimes ringing, Meg? No eureka?”
The title did sound familiar, I had to admit. I remembered that Christopher Marlowe had written a play called Tamburlaine the Great, and knew that George Frideric Handel had composed an opera Tamerlano in the early eighteenth century. The British fantasy writer Angela Carter wrote an elliptical short story—“The Kiss,” I believe it was titled—in which the Turkic conqueror was a character. But Marlowe and Handel were plainly no Bostonians, and Carter, a Brit, hadn’t started publishing until almost a ce
ntury and a half after this Tamerlane saw the light of day. Nonplussed, I had to admit I was drawing a blank.
“Well,” he said. “Logic and reason dictate that this is an exceptionally high-quality forgery, the finest facsimile known to bibliophilic man, and not a genuine copy of the so-called Black Tulip of American literary rarities—”
So that was what the beautifully drawn flowers flanking Will’s name on the letter envelope were meant to represent.
“—Edgar Allan Poe’s first book. But if it’s really and truly authentic, as he claims it is and it looks to be, though I have every reason not to trust him or myself, for that matter, this would join the ranks of only a dozen copies known to have survived.”
“So you’ve seen one before, you’re saying?”
“Seen, but never touched,” he answered with unabashed and unwonted excitement. “I remember my father taking me to Philadelphia back when I was eleven, on a father-son field trip around Halloween to go to an exhibit at the Free Library. They were showing a copy of Tamerlane they’d just acquired through a bequest from a collector named Richard Gimbel. Our train trip and the nice hotel on Rittenhouse Square, where we had a fancy enough dinner that I was required to wear a jacket and tie, are a bit of a blur in retrospect. But one thing I remember clearly is my father pointing at the Poe displayed behind glass and telling me, ‘Now there’s a book I’ll never possess, Will. That is a true unicorn. Never forget you saw this.’”
“Can I touch?” Maisie asked, and before Will or I could say no, she’d reached out and gingerly laid her fingertips on the cover, as if it were a sacred relic. Which, in some ways, I suppose it possibly was.
“Let’s have a look, but then best put it back in the safe until I’ve had a chance to do some research,” Will said, delicately lifting it and leafing through the first few pages of poetry.
“May I ask what Slader wrote you? It is Slader, right?”
“I don’t see who else it would be, Meg,” turning to the end to see there was no colophon, then paging through the twenty leaves—forty pages—of text. It was clear Will took this book seriously, unicorn or no. “Like I said last night, his Poe calligraphy is stunningly good, impeccable, and I don’t think he was trying that hard.”
“How’s that?”
He set the pamphlet down again on the table. “The paper, unlike what I’m seeing here with this Tamerlane, isn’t as period as it should have been. And the purplish color of the ink is entirely wrong. More Virginia Woolf than Edgar Poe. He knew I would know. If he’d wanted to, he could’ve fabricated a far more credible letter in dark brown or black ink and on period paper, but there was no point in bothering. That’s what he’s telegraphing me.”
Maisie looked at Will as if he were speaking in a foreign language that needed to be translated. But he stared out the window and continued, for all intents and purposes talking to himself.
“You know, with Slader potentially active again, I’m going to have to be careful at work. Poe manuscript materials don’t come on the market that often, but when they do, they go for big money. There was a previously unknown letter that came up at Christie’s around five years ago, about ‘The Tell-Tale Heart,’ and it went off for a hundred and a half.”
“That’s a hundred and fifty thousand, Maze,” I explained, and she raised her eyebrows.
“A holograph manuscript of one of his poems, ‘The Conqueror Worm,’ fetched twice that at a much smaller auction house up in New England.”
“You haven’t answered my question,” I said.
“If I’m not mistaken, the record was set at auction for a two-page manuscript of a love poem he wrote right before he died. Hammered down at eight hundred thousand or so, and it was only the first half of the poem. That wasn’t quite a decade ago. Imagine what it would bring today—”
“Will?” I asked, with an impatient frown.
Startled, he looked over at me, suddenly cognizant that Maisie and I were staring at him, and said, “I’m sorry, yes?”
“What does all this mean?”
“Like I said, he wants to meet. No doubt to discuss this book—this, whatever it is.”
“When?”
“Friday.”
Sometimes my husband exasperated me. I loved him, as the toady phrase has it, warts and all. Yet there were times, like now, when he could be unnerving, if not confounding. I had a hundred different arguments against his going along with such lunacy, not the least of which was that he would be leaving me and Maisie alone in the house. Divide and conquer, wasn’t that the oldest trick in the book?
“And where is this meeting supposed to take place?”
Will scratched his temple, hesitated. “He seems to prefer meeting in nice old hotels. The Beekman Arms, at three.”
“If you don’t go, then what?”
“He’ll persist. He’s the definition of persistence, as you of all people know.”
“You absolutely shouldn’t do this,” I insisted, aware he’d made up his mind.
He considered my words before countering, “I shouldn’t, it’s true. But I’m not left with a choice. Slader’s not only persistent, he’s clever. This Tamerlane? If it is authentic, it’s either stolen or the rare book find of the twenty-first century. The twelfth known copy turned up in a New Hampshire antiques barn three decades ago.”
“And if it’s a forgery?” I asked, hoping my frustration that all of this was unfolding in front of Maisie wasn’t overly obvious to her. Despite the girl’s bravado, she was fragile and hurt.
“You’ve heard me say how the untutored eye is the forger’s best friend? My eye is anything but untutored. Without getting into a more scientific analysis of the book, and despite the fact that, as I said, it shouldn’t logically be right, every instinct in me suggests it could be genuine. The paper tone, its texture and weight and, what, frailty. This uneven darkness of the ink. The variety of vintage stains, tide lines along the bottom edges, and other flaws. And if that’s the case, this is trouble because it’s here now with no reasonable explanation as to why I possess it. The only provenance is a forged letter in Poe’s hand. There’s a reason Slader gave it to Maisie along a dark road where no one was watching,” he said, then asked Maisie, “Do you remember if he was wearing gloves?”
“Honestly, I couldn’t—”
“I’m lost,” I interrupted. “Why don’t we call the police, if you think it’s stolen?”
Any mention of the police made my husband recoil. After his encounter with the law back when I first knew him, he steered clear whenever possible, even though I knew he hadn’t relapsed into forging since. He’d confessed, done his penance, reinvented himself. Even as I understood his reluctance, I began to compass the vague outlines of Henry Slader’s trap here. Was Tamerlane, to use a childhood phrase for a sophisticated ploy, a hot potato?
“Rather than the cops, I think it’s the convict I need to consult with. Shall we go clear the table and wash dishes?”
“Let’s do,” I said, stifling my irritation.
“Speaking of which, did you move Ripley’s bowls, Maze?” he asked.
Maisie said she hadn’t.
“Would you mind keeping an eye out for them? And for Ripley too? They’ve both gone missing, it seems,” he said, and as he spoke I noticed that the perplexed and perplexing look on his face was one I hadn’t seen since the bad old days when Slader first surfaced in our lives, and when poor Adam, mysteriously friends with Slader, had been slain. Days which, other than unclouded memories of my brother, I’d just as soon consign to oblivion. After all, as I was reminded in the woods last night, not only did his murder remain unsolved, but any leads that might once have existed had now gone as cold as the headstone in the Montauk cemetery where he was buried.
If Henry Slader had lost some years out of his life while in prison, it appeared he hadn’t lost his edge as a world-class forger and des
picable yegg. Here he was again, as welcome as some sarcoma, as malignancy itself. I had been so keen on forgetting my encounters with the man, wiping him from memory, that I could scarcely picture him in my mind. But when I walked into the low-ceilinged, dark-wood-paneled tavern of the Beekman Arms, that handsome white-clapboard colonial behemoth at the center of Rhinebeck village, the oldest continuously operating inn in America and a place where George Washington and many other dignitaries had slept, I recognized him at once.
Pale as cod, head not shaven but shorn tight, angular in every way, spare but still strong, wearing a black sweater and jeans, he rose with a disconcerting grin to shake my hand, as if we were long-lost friends. Could he possibly have forgotten? Not about our hating each other, but about what he’d done to me years ago. When I placed my warm talon, my fleshy pincers of a right hand, in his and gently pressed, he winced. Almost imperceptibly, but unmistakably, winced.
We sat at a table that paralleled the venerable old bar, me on a Windsor-style bench that ran along the wall, Slader with his back to the daytime regulars drinking their beer. Before he could say a word of the speech he’d no doubt rehearsed, I asked, “So you’ve taken to assaulting girls now? In the guise of a ghost, to boot.”
“Nothing of the kind. I just gave her the package, asked her to give it to you.”
“She came home all scraped up, scared out of her wits, and you’re saying you didn’t push her over?”
Slader shrugged. “Didn’t think she’d frighten so easily—”
“Your entire intention was to terrify her, you disingenuous bastard. Now you’re going to insult her on top of that?”
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