The Bookman's Tale: A Novel of Obsession

by Charlie Lovett

  “Sorry, Mother,” she said, taking Peter’s hand and giving him a gentle squeeze. “Do go on, Peter.”

  “Well, she was so pissed off about the Grolier Club,” said Peter, squeezing Amanda’s hand back to let her know where his ultimate loyalties lay, “that she became a founding member of the Hroswitha Club.”

  “The what?” said Sarah.

  “The Hroswitha Club,” said Peter. “It was a club for lady book collectors founded in nineteen forty-four.”

  “Ladies?” said Amanda, with a hint of politically correct scorn in her voice.

  “That’s what women called themselves in nineteen forty-four, dear,” said Sarah.

  “They met at your mother’s apartment in New York one time,” Peter continued. “Apparently the Hroswitha Club was suitably impressed.”

  “The ladies in my family have always known what to do in a roomful of rare books,” said Amanda, surreptitiously pinching Peter.

  “Whatever can you mean by that, dear?” asked Sarah, but Peter was spared the embarrassment of Amanda’s answer by Charlie’s call to dinner.

  London, Tuesday, February 21, 1995

  Liz insisted on hearing Peter’s account of his trip to Cornwall before she would share with him the contents of Graham Sykes’s manuscript, so as they inched through the London traffic, Peter told her of his visit with the old scholar. He skirted around the issue of the Pandosto, saying only that Sykes had taken an interest in the document Peter showed him, but even as he danced around the truth, Peter began to see that he had no choice but to trust Liz Sutcliffe. Like it or not, she was now a part of all this. She needed to know the whole story.

  “I just don’t understand,” said Liz. “Graham’s manuscript is about a hundred-and-thirty-year-old scandal. Outside the world of Victorian art nuts, who’s going to give a toss? There’s just nothing in there that’s worth . . . worth killing for.”

  Peter took a breath, then the plunge. “What about the most valuable relic in the history of English literature—would that be worth killing for?”

  “How valuable?”

  “Millions.”

  “And where is this relic?” said Liz.

  “In the backseat of your car,” said Peter.

  “Well, now I feel safe,” said Liz. “Do you want to tell me what’s going on here?”

  And so Peter told her everything, from his finding of the painting to his visit to Evenlode Manor and the discovery of the Pandosto, to his suspicions that Thomas Gardner and Julia Alderson were trying to cover up the fact that the book was a forgery just long enough to get a few million pounds from some gullible American institution like Ridgefield University. They had reached the M40 by the time he finished his story, but the traffic was nearly at a standstill.

  “So if B.B. is a forger,” said Liz, “then the Pandosto is very likely a fake.”

  “Exactly,” said Peter. “So what can you tell me about B.B.? Was he Phillip Gardner?”

  “I don’t know,” said Liz.

  “But I thought Sykes had written a whole exposé of this guy,” said Peter.

  “To be honest,” said Liz, “I was a little disappointed with the manuscript. He seemed to be missing some key information.”

  “Like the actual identity of his subject?” asked Peter.

  “He said he didn’t want to tell me that until just before we went to press,” said Liz. “He just calls him ‘Mr. X.’ But here’s what I do know. B.B. was an amateur artist who was kept out of the Royal Academy and the Watercolour Society by someone named Reginald Alderson.”

  “John Alderson’s ancestor,” said Peter. “So it does come back to Kingham. B.B. must be Gardner.”

  “According to Sykes, B.B. married a wealthy widow who was keeping him in clover and financing the rebuilding of his house. Then he took up with an American woman in London and made the mistake of getting her pregnant. Rather a big mistake for a kept man to make in eighteen seventy-six.”

  “Just like the old sisters told me,” said Peter, “but they didn’t know about the pregnancy.”

  “Alderson found out about the affair and started blackmailing B.B., but Sykes is a little fuzzy on exactly what Alderson was extorting. Alderson was pretty well off, and blackmail seems a big risk for a wealthy man to take just to become more wealthy. Apparently most of B.B.’s surviving output is hanging on the walls of Evenlode Manor, but Sykes says they’re fairly unimaginative paintings—watercolors mostly—and since Alderson kept B.B. out of the Royal Academy, why would he have extorted paintings he could have bought for next to nothing?”

  “I know exactly what he extorted,” said Peter. “I’ve held it in my hand.”

  “The Pandosto?” asked Liz.

  “Maybe,” said Peter. “But that wasn’t the only thing in Evenlode Manor that came from Evenlode House. Every document in that box that Julia Alderson showed me was marked ‘E.H.’ Alderson and Gardner were rival collectors; Alderson must have blackmailed Gardner out of all his best material.”

  “Would a collector really stoop to blackmail just to get some old documents?” asked Liz.

  “You haven’t spent much time around bibliophiles, have you?” asked Peter. He recalled the lengths to which Thomas Wise and Mark Hofmann had been driven by their passions. Perhaps B.B. wasn’t a forger, but simply a victim of blackmail. Perhaps the Pandosto was genuine.

  “One thing Sykes is firm on,” said Liz, “is the dates. He says the child was born in late eighteen seventy-six; the blackmail began the following spring and continued for about two years. Then whatever trail of evidence Sykes was following apparently went dry. That’s why I was so pissed off at the manuscript. It raises more questions than it answers. What happened to the child? What happened to the mistress? Why was the whole extortion affair so short lived?”

  “Where did Sykes get all his information?” asked Peter.

  “A lot of it came from B.B.’s correspondence with his bookseller. Chap named Benjamin Mayhew.”

  “Are you serious?” said Peter.

  “As a heart attack,” said Liz.

  “Benjamin Mayhew is one of the names in the Pandosto.”

  “Well, that makes sense. So who the hell was B.B.?”

  “He had to be Phillip Gardner,” said Peter. “The evidence fits perfectly. Obviously Sykes never saw the box of documents or he would have figured out what the blackmail was all about.”

  “Did you tell him about the other documents?” asked Liz.

  “No,” said Peter, “just the Pandosto. Frankly, everything else paled by comparison.”

  “There’s something else you need to know,” said Liz, after they had driven a few miles in silence. The traffic had finally thinned out on the motorway and they were barreling toward Oxford.

  “What’s that?” said Peter.

  “Well,” said Liz, “you seem convinced that Thomas Gardner and Julia Alderson are the ones who killed Sykes and ransacked my house and office.”

  “It had to be them,” said Peter.

  “Well, it couldn’t have been both of them,” said Liz, “because I phoned Evenlode Manor this morning from a phone box in Hampstead on my way back from the heath and spoke with Julia Alderson. She can’t have been in London ransacking my office.”

  “Why on earth did you call her?” said Peter, jerking forward in his seat for the first time since they had left London.

  “Graham mentioned her in his acknowledgments as the person who had shown him B.B.’s watercolors. I wanted to try to talk her into letting us reproduce them for the book.”

  “And what did she say?” asked Peter.

  “She’s expecting me for tea tomorrow at three.”

  London, 1877

  Benjamin Mayhew slipped into his usual seat in Sotheby’s salesroom. Across the room, leaning in the doorway, was the familiar brooding figure of Reginald Alderson. Looking through the catalog of the day’s sale, Benjamin reflected how disappointing the afternoon was likely to be for Reginald. Benjamin knew that Regina
ld collected documents signed by the kings and queens of England. He knew, too, that Alderson’s collection lacked the signatures of only four monarchs, and all four were represented in that afternoon’s sale—four documents that would be leaving Sotheby’s with Benjamin Mayhew bound to Evenlode House and the collection of Phillip Gardner.

  Benjamin glanced up at Alderson again and realized that he was not, after all, brooding, as was his wont during these fruitless appearances at Sotheby’s. On the contrary, a sly smile played across Alderson’s face as he brushed a hank of hair back from his forehead.

  As the auction progressed, Alderson’s behavior became even stranger. He did not move from his spot in the doorway, nor did he lift a hand to bid on the documents that Mayhew knew he so coveted. This must have come as a disappointment to the consignor, for the spirited bidding between Alderson and Mayhew had driven the prices of documents to new heights recently, and it was generally assumed among the antiquarians of London that today’s auction would be no exception. Instead, Mayhew easily bought the four royal documents, as well as several other choice items, without a serious challenger. Alderson seemed amused by the whole affair. As soon as the final hammer fell, he tipped his hat to Mayhew and disappeared from the room, now buzzing with gossip about the sale. Mayhew accepted the congratulations of his colleagues perfunctorily, for pleased as he was to be bearing new treasures to his best customer, he had a nagging feeling that Reginald Alderson was up to something.

  Two days after the Sotheby’s sale, Phillip Gardner came up to London to claim his prizes. Far from being the gloating victor that Benjamin usually saw after a successful auction, Phillip slumped into the bookseller’s office a picture of abject defeat.

  “You do know that we won,” said Mayhew, opening a large portfolio on his desk and displaying the documents that now belonged to Gardner. “Some spectacular acquisitions, and at an excellent price.” Phillip did not so much as glance at the documents, but with a long sigh, he merely fell into a plush armchair under the window.

  “Do you know of a fellow named Collier?” said Gardner. “John Payne Collier.”

  “I know of his work,” said Mayhew, puzzled by the abruptness of the incongruous question.

  “But you don’t know him personally? He’s not a customer?”

  “No,” said Mayhew. “Is he still alive? He must be quite an old man by now. He was living in Maidenhead, last I heard. There was always something of a taint to his work after that business with the Shakespeare folio.”

  “He forged the marginalia, isn’t that right?” asked Gardner.

  “So it would seem. I was a young man at the time, first starting out in the book business. It caused quite a stir, I can tell you.”

  “And he lives in Maidenhead, you say?”

  “I suppose if he’s still alive he may still be there. Why this sudden interest in Collier?”

  “I’ve been thinking about starting a collection of books on forgery,” said Gardner.

  “That’s quite a departure.”

  “Not at all,” said Gardner. “It seems to me that a man who collects documents should know as much about forgery as he can, if only to protect himself.” Benjamin knew enough about the eccentricities of collectors not to question the motivation behind a fresh passion, but merely to take that new interest as an opportunity for additional sales.

  “Is it just the Shakespeare forgers you’re interested in, or is it any forgery?” asked Mayhew.

  “Any of them, I suppose,” said Gardner. “Are there other Shakespeare forgers?”

  “I think I might be able to get you a nice little collection of books on William Henry Ireland,” said Mayhew. “He was the greatest. Forged manuscripts, letters, all sorts of things. He was absolutely shameless.”

  “And would these books tell how he did it?” asked Gardner, and for the first time in the conversation, Benjamin Mayhew suspected that he knew what his customer was thinking.

  Ridgefield, 1987

  The Ridgefield campus was a riot of dogwoods and azaleas and the students had returned from Easter break in shorts and T-shirts, when Peter pulled the last stack of letters from the last box of Amanda Devereaux’s papers and finally found something he could not share with Sarah and Amanda—a correspondence that, unique among the papers he had cataloged, showed Amanda Devereaux not as a book collector but as a woman: the correspondence between Amanda Devereaux and her future husband, Robert Ridgefield.

  They had met in the New York salesroom of Sotheby’s, where Robert Ridgefield’s first encounter with Amanda Devereaux had left him both outbid and smitten. She had just turned forty; he was twenty years her senior. They corresponded first about books—Ridgefield was not a serious collector, but occasionally bid on something that struck his fancy. They saw each other in New York, where Ridgefield lived during most of the season. Amanda liked to be in the auction room for important sales, and Ridgefield soon learned to follow the schedules at Sotheby’s and Parke-Bernet so he did not miss a chance to encounter her.

  Protestations of love gradually crept into Ridgefield’s letters to Amanda Devereaux; her letters to him were concerned mostly with points of bibliography, but she did not rebuff his epistolary advances nor his increasingly frequent invitations to social events. This delicate dance between the aging banker and the brilliant book collector culminated in the spring of 1939. The final letter in the collection, which Peter felt compelled to hide from both Sarah Ridgefield and her daughter, was dated May 2.

  My Dear Mr. Ridgefield,

  I write to respond to your kind proposal of the twenty-fifth, for which I thank you. I have for many years considered myself a spinster and have had no thought of marriage—my books being both husband and children to me. However, as I approach the age after which such positions cannot be recanted, I begin to feel that not only a husband clothed in flesh and blood, but similarly attired children, if it be God’s will, would enrich my life in a way that my books, precious to me though they may be, have never done.

  It is my potential acquisition of the latter that compels me to write you. For years I have ignored the protestation of both family and friends that a woman’s life cannot be complete without children. I fancied myself a “modern girl” above such things. However, in more recent years I have gradually come to agree with a great collecting compatriot who once told me that children were the greatest blessing of his life and that the absence of them in my own would be my great sadness.

  You are not a young man, Mr. Ridgefield, and although you may represent my only opportunity to add a husband to my collection, I could not in good conscience accept your proposal without telling you this—at this late stage of my life, for I have completed four decades as you know, I have a deep yearning for motherhood, which I would expect any husband to honor. At your age, you may not relish the thought of becoming a father, and I would quite understand your feelings in that case. If, however, you are willing to give me a chance at motherhood, I will, with humility and genuine affection, accept your proposal of marriage.

  Yours,

  Amanda Devereaux

  Ridgefield had obviously agreed to the terms of Ms. Devereaux’s acceptance; eleven months later, Sarah Ridgefield had been born. But Peter’s heart ached for Ms. Devereaux’s granddaughter when he read this letter. No matter how much Amanda pretended not to be bothered by the fact that she could not bear children, Peter knew the day would come when she would feel that void in her life that her grandmother had felt. But for Amanda there would be no wealthy banker waiting in the wings to provide her with progeny. There would be only Peter, trying to help her cope with her loss.

  —

  Two weeks after filing the last of the folders containing the Devereaux papers in its archival storage box, Peter Byerly graduated from Ridgefield University.

  “Another year and this will be you,” said Peter, as Amanda found him in the crowd and admired his academic finery. Charlie Ridgefield clapped him on the back and Sarah kissed his cheek. Peter’s pa
rents arrived late and missed the ceremony.

  For three years, Peter had successfully kept his own parents and Amanda’s from coming face-to-face—an effort in which he was abetted by the apathy of his mother and father. The Byerlys had met Amanda twice—once on campus and once when she insisted that Peter take her home for Thanksgiving dinner. On both occasions he had introduced her only as Amanda, and made no mention of her wealthy family.

  Though both the Ridgefields’ mansion and his parents’ farmhouse sat on several acres of undeveloped land, and though they were only eight miles apart, the inhabitants of those homes could not have come from more different worlds. Two hours after his graduation, at a reception given in his honor by Amanda and her parents, those worlds collided.

  Peter’s father, Joseph Byerly, looked stiff and uncomfortable in a pressed suit and ineptly tied tie, which his wife, Doreen, had obviously forced him to wear for the occasion. He lurked in the corner of the patio, within striking distance of the one thing in the world of the Ridgefields that he understood—the bar. His father’s unobtrusive, if increasingly inebriated, presence was far preferable to that of Peter’s mother, whose lime green concoction of a dress looked like something made from the curtains of a double-wide trailer. Doreen Byerly swept through the throng of professors, parents, recent graduates, and Ridgefields as if she were the hostess.