The Bookman's Tale: A Novel of Obsession

by Charlie Lovett

  Peter closed the book for a moment to allow himself to breathe. He could not hold still and he got up and paced the room, stopping to mindlessly adjust books on a shelf every few seconds. Now that he had some distance, even if it was only a few feet, on the Pandosto, the excitement and curiosity he felt were tempered with a slow surge of fear. For whatever reason, he had been entrusted with a priceless artifact. What if he lost it, or spilled tea on it? What if he was wrong and made a fool of himself? What if he was right and people expected him to make speeches and appear on television? Every vision of the future seemed fraught with peril.

  In an attempt to calm himself, Peter began putting the documents back into their box. It was not until he got to a commission signed by Lord Nelson that he happened to glance at the upper-right corner of one of these documents. Barely visible, in the lightest pencil, were two of the same initials he had read in the Pandosto, “E.H.” Here they were written in interlocking cursive—the sort of monogram one sometimes found in Victorian books. Peter began to sift through the other documents, and found that every one had the same lightly penciled monogram in the same corner. He hadn’t seen it on any of the other books he had examined that morning—those that did have ownership markings said simply “Alderson.” Who was E.H.? How had his collection of autographed material come to the Aldersons’ library? And what relationship did he have to the elusive B.B.? Peter looked up from the E.H. monogram and saw the empty shelf in the case in front of him. He felt the first pieces of the puzzle click together, like the tumblers of a successfully picked lock.

  He had seen this monogram before, in the book from which he had stolen the watercolor—a book about forging Shakespeare materials. And if you had such a book in your library, signed by the same hand that inscribed your priceless Shakespeare artifact, it might not look good. He remembered the mousy girl’s surreptitious glance toward the empty shelf. She had known about the box and possibly about the Pandosto. Had she removed Malone’s book on Shakespeare forgery from the library? Was she setting him up? Did she know the Pandosto was a fake, but want her brother to be able to sell it without suspicion to some patsy of an American? Or did she know it was real, and simply want to avoid distracting Peter with unnecessary concerns? And what did John Alderson know about all this? Two things seemed certain to Peter—the mousy woman should not be trusted, and her deadline could not be ignored. She obviously knew something about the book world—maybe enough to go to Hay to sell the forgery book and perhaps whatever else had been on that shelf. He had an odd feeling that she was more in charge of this library than her brother, and that Alderson would listen to her if she said the American was cheating them and needed to be replaced.

  Peter glanced at his watch. It was past four, and Alderson would be returning soon. Peter needed the brother to trust him, and in his experience there was nothing like a nice fat check to earn people’s trust. He folded the Pandosto back into its elaborate case and quickly put the rest of the documents back in their box and returned it to the cabinet. He locked the cabinet door and replaced the key in the desk drawer. From the case to the right of the fireplace he pulled three volumes at random and stacked them on top of the Pandosto. Then he returned to some pretense of examining books until he heard footsteps approaching through the drawing room.

  “Getting on well, I hope,” said John Alderson, striding into the room.

  “Yes, quite well,” said Peter. “There are some very nice things here.”

  “Well, I’m glad to hear it.”

  “In fact,” said Peter, “there’s one item I’m quite eager to purchase. A friend of mine has been looking for it for years. It’s your Johnson’s Dictionary.”

  “But it’s not even a first edition,” said Alderson. “I shouldn’t think it would be worth much.” Peter thought it interesting that John Alderson, who had pretended to know very little about books, knew the edition of his Dictionary.

  “I can give you two thousand pounds for it,” said Peter. It was a strong retail price, but Peter could easily afford it. He would be delighted to present the book to Ridgefield, and John Alderson, whom Peter suspected knew exactly what the book was worth, would now believe that the local American bookseller had more money than sense—a belief that could be very helpful if the sister started agitating for his removal.

  “Two thousand?” said Alderson, clearly taken aback.

  “There will be a lot more that I’ll want to buy,” said Peter, “but I have an especially eager customer for that particular book.”

  “Well, then, two thousand it is,” said Alderson, with a chuckle.

  “I’m afraid I might not be able to get back for several days,” said Peter, as he pulled out his checkbook and began writing out a draft. “I hope that won’t be a problem.” He tore the check out and held it out to Alderson. Peter could see a flash of greed in his eyes that he had seen before in those who thought they had just been paid more than their old books were worth.

  “No,” said Alderson, “that’s not a problem at all.” He took the check from Peter and tucked it into his shirt pocket.

  “And I wonder,” said Peter, “if I might be able to take a few items with me.” He picked up the Pandosto and the three books on top of it. “My reference materials are back at my cottage, and I’d like to do a little further research on these.” It was a delicate moment. Alderson hesitated more than Peter would have liked, enough that each man, perhaps, sensed that the other was not entirely what he seemed.

  Alderson’s eyes darted to the locked cabinet that held the box of documents and then he smiled at Peter. “Of course,” he said, with what Peter felt certain was false jollity. “Take whatever you need. Now, can you stay for tea?”

  “I’m afraid not,” said Peter. “I’m expecting a call from America at five, so I need to be getting home. Shall I ring you in a few days?”

  “Lovely,” said Alderson. “I’ll show you out.” Peter was halfway down the front steps, descending into the early evening gloom, when he heard Alderson’s voice behind him. For the first time since Peter met him, his voice quavered almost imperceptibly. “I don’t suppose you met my sister, Julia.”

  “No,” said Peter steadily. “I haven’t had the pleasure.”

  “Well, then,” said Alderson, brightening. “We shall have to introduce you the next time.”

  —

  Loath as he was to return to the scene of his crime, Peter felt he had to examine whatever books Julia Alderson had removed from her family library. A quick call to the shop in Hay-on-Wye confirmed that though the next day was Sunday, the shopkeeper would be in most of the afternoon. Peter also confirmed that his refrigerator was nearly empty, so he pulled on his coat and stepped into the darkness for a walk up to the village shop. He found walking to the shop once or twice a day to buy food as needed a comforting routine.

  Peter selected a frozen dinner of chicken tikka masala, and then did his usual trick of pretending to read the cooking instructions while he stood in the short queue at the cash register so he wouldn’t accidentally make eye contact with anyone. He had cooked enough of these dinners that he could have recited the instructions from memory, but they had successfully protected him from making conversation with his fellow shoppers for months. Thus it took him a moment to realize he was being addressed by the Irish brogue behind him, which said, “It’s Mr. Byerly, isn’t it?”

  “I beg your pardon?” said Peter, for whom this phrase was an instinctive reaction to any form of public address. It bought him time, if nothing else.

  “You’re Mr. Byerly,” said the woman, who now stepped beside Peter.

  “Yes,” said Peter, glancing up just long enough to recognize the housekeeper from Evenlode Manor before turning to study the display of crisps.

  “You’re not the first person to come poking around the manor, you know,” said Miss O’Hara.

  Peter’s avoidance of conversation with the housekeeper had been more out of habit than a particular feeling of nervousness. Being sho
t at earlier in the day had made public conversation less intimidating. Now it suddenly occurred to him that Miss O’Hara might be an excellent source of inside information on the Alderson family. He turned and looked her in the eye.

  “And who’s come before me?” he asked.

  “Old man come up from Cornwall and wanted to look at paintings. Miss Julia was none too happy about that, I can tell you.”

  Peter tried to conceal his amazement. The old man must have been Liz Sutcliffe’s secret scholar, and therefore the paintings must be by the mysterious B.B. The connections between the Amanda painting, Evenlode Manor, and the Pandosto seemed to be multiplying.

  “So Julia’s not married,” he said.

  “Never has been,” said Miss O’Hara. “Disappointed in love, she is. Always falling for the wrong person, Mr. John says.”

  “When the old man was visiting from Cornwall,” said Peter, “did Miss Julia show him anything in the library?”

  Miss O’Hara did not seem to think this question unduly prying for an idle conversation in a shop queue. “Couldn’t have done without me knowing. I was dusting books that week. Take every one off the shelf and dust it twice a year. I was in the library the whole day.”

  “So you’d know if any books went missing.”

  “Miss Julia took a shelfful up to her room a few weeks back. Probably trying to impress some man. She doesn’t let me in her room, but I suppose she’s still got them in there. Mr. John never lays a finger on the downstairs books.”

  “Next,” said the shopkeeper from behind the counter. Peter tried not to grin as he stepped forward. He was beginning to feel like a genuine detective. He didn’t know if any crime had been committed, but the mousy Miss Julia was certainly shaping up as a prime suspect. He was more certain than ever that he had to return to Hay. He only hoped that the book in the familiar blue binding was still there.

  Ridgefield, 1985

  Peter wanted Amanda’s birthday to be perfect.

  “It’s a weird day to have a birthday,” she had told him. “I mean, everyone is always celebrating on Halloween, but it doesn’t have anything to do with me.” She had already planned the evening; that left him to find a present, and he wanted to give her something that would reflect her passions and his and thus be unique to their relationship. Jewelry did not fit the bill. Amanda happily wore the same pair of diamond stud earrings every day, and that seemed to be the extent of her interest in adornment. Scarves, handbags, chocolate, and flowers—all of which Francis Leland suggested—seemed equally inappropriate.

  In a box in the dusty back room of a local antique shop, Peter discovered an early edition of George MacDonald’s 1870 fantasy novel, At the Back of the North Wind. The book was illustrated by the Pre-Raphaelite follower Arthur Hughes. Amanda, he knew, considered Hughes on a par with her idol Edward Burne-Jones. This would be the first book Peter would give Amanda. The front cover and about half the spine were missing. Several signatures were loose, one such gathering of pages literally hanging by a thread from the middle of the book. Many pages were torn at the margins. To any serious collector it was worthless. Peter bought it for a dollar.

  When he showed the book to Hank Christiansen, Hank agreed it was a perfect candidate for rebinding.

  “It’ll be a great project,” said Hank. “And if you screw it up, it’s no big deal since the book belongs to you.”

  “I’d rather not screw it up,” said Peter.

  “Don’t worry,” said Hank. “By the time you’re through with this book, it will be elegant. When is Amanda’s birthday?”

  “Halloween,” said Peter.

  “That gives you a month,” said Hank. “We’d better get to work.”

  Peter had become something between a student and an assistant in Hank’s workshop, often working alone with Hank after the rest of the staff had left. They seldom spoke about anything other than book repair, frequently working side by side for hours in companionable quiet. It was usually Hank who broke the silence, with a gentle instruction for Peter or sometimes a witty remark he seemed to have spent an hour thinking up. On these occasions his eyes twinkled behind his glasses as he waited for Peter to laugh. Peter always did. He found Hank wise and funny and, because of the long periods of silence, easy to be around. If pressed, he might have even called Hank a friend.

  Though he had assisted Hank in several binding jobs the previous spring, Peter had never done a full binding by himself. As he lay the North Wind on the counter to plan an attack, he hoped a month would be enough time.

  The first task was to remove what was left of the original cover. Peter clamped the text block of the book in the job backer, the same upright vice he had first seen Hank leaning over a year earlier. Using a lifting knife, Peter sliced away the remnants of the spine and rear cover. He placed a few dollops of gloppy paste on the spine and allowed the moisture to loosen the glue on the backs of the pages. Within thirty minutes the glue was soft, and Peter peeled it away with his lifting knife. Taking the now disbound book from the job backer, Peter began the process of pulling the text—separating the signatures from one another and from the thread that had bound them together. By the end of the afternoon the book lay scattered on the counter in unsewn signatures.

  Peter spent the next week mending the tears in North Wind’s pages. There were more than he had at first realized, but few of them affected the text and none extended into the illustrations. Peter was happy about this because the kozo, the thin but fibrous Japanese paper that he pasted across the tears to repair the paper, dried an opaque white. An expert could use tiny enough pieces of kozo, even individual fibers, that a torn illustration could be repaired without the repair being visible, but Peter was no expert. Though some would have found the process of fixing one margin tear after another with a tiny brush, a special paste, and a slender piece of kozo tedious, Peter achieved an almost Zen-like state during these hours of careful repetitive work. He worked for seven hours one day, missing his English seminar and having no idea of the time until Hank turned the lights out and announced it was closing time.

  Before he began resewing the sections of the North Wind, Peter picked out material for the new endpapers. Because he planned to do an elegant full leather binding, Peter chose a hand-marbled paper with swirls of blue, gold, and white. Then he arranged the sections of the book in order and began sewing them onto three strips of linen tape, stretched tautly into a sewing frame. The linen strips would form the inside of the book’s spine. After a long day of work, Peter had a tightly sewn text block. The pages turned easily but did not pull loose when he tugged gently on them. Peter began to feel that the resurrection of the North Wind had truly begun.

  —

  “Come on,” said Amanda, “at least give me a hint.” They were sitting on a bench behind the library enjoying the cool air of an autumn evening during a study break.

  “No hints,” said Peter, turning his back to her in mock indignation.

  “I’ll bet I can make you talk,” said Amanda, tickling him around his sides, but though Peter laughed and squirmed, he didn’t tell her a thing.

  “It’s no fair,” said Amanda in a pouty voice, as she slipped her arms around him from behind and rested her head on his shoulders. “I don’t want to have secrets from each other.”

  “We don’t,” said Peter, suddenly much more serious. “Not real secrets. But this is your birthday present. You’ve got to let me have a little fun.”

  “Oh, all right,” said Amanda, kissing his cheek and then disentangling her arms and standing up. “But you have to let me get a little work done.”

  “Hey,” called Peter at her back, as she skipped back toward the library, “this study break was your idea!”

  —

  “This is nice work,” said Hank the next day, fanning through the pages of the North Wind and nodding in approval. “You can tell when work like this is done with real love.”

  Peter blushed deeply, never considering that Hank may have been refe
rring to Peter’s love for books rather than his love for Amanda. “Thanks,” he managed to mumble.

  “Have you thought about what sort of leather you want to use?” asked Hank.

  “I thought maybe the blue calf if we have enough left,” said Peter. “I mean, I wasn’t sure how much that would cost but . . .” Peter let his words hang in the air. He had been trying to decide how to approach Hank about the costs of the materials he was using in this job. The leather would be the most expensive single item, but everything from the kozo to the banding tapes cost money. Most of Peter’s hours of work in the library were classified as work-study time. He had started to do a little book dealing and had made some modest profits in these fledgling efforts, but almost all of that he had spent buying up more books from various charity and antique shops. His parents grudgingly sent him twenty or thirty dollars a month as an allowance, though the only thing it allowed him to do was pay for coffee with Amanda some evenings. He wasn’t sure how he was going to pay for the materials for the North Wind rebind, but he at least needed to know how much he was going to owe.

  “Well,” said Hank, “I figure a piece of blue calf big enough for this job should run about four hours.”

  “I beg your pardon?” said Peter.

  “You give me an extra four hours’ work this semester and I’ll give you a piece of calf.”

  “What about the rest of the supplies? Boards, endpapers, gold leaf?” Peter saw a familiar twinkle in Hank’s eye—a twinkle he had first seen when Hank mentioned the girlfriend pile.

  “I figure by the time you screw up cutting your binder’s board a couple of times, you’ll owe me about three hours, plus the four for the leather. Of course you’ve already put in about thirty or forty hours of extra time since August, so it seems to me I owe you.”