Harvard Yard (Peter Fallon)

by William Martin

  “Speculated?” said Peter. “What would lead you to speculate that the play mentioned by Thomas Shepard was a lost Shakespeare manuscript?”

  Will Wedge swirled his ice cream. “Come on, Mr. Fallon, you must have heard rumblings in the booksellers’ underground.”

  “The only rumblings I heard started with a term paper.” Peter glanced at Dorothy.

  “They actually started in my tutorial with Professor O’Hill,” she said. “Once he read the John Wedge commonplace book. He gave me a few suggestions. I worked backward to Shepard’s diary. But from what this poem says, it all ends here. ‘In Harvard Hall the play is kept, all hidden from the world . . .’”

  “Yes,” said Peter. “The man who wrote that had been rusticated—a common form of punishment in those days. He wrote it, then he disappeared. Considering that he left his commonplace book behind, he must have left in a big hurry. I doubt that he went back to Cambridge to rescue the play in Harvard Hall.”

  “Which burned in 1764,” said Dorothy. “Professor O’Hill will be disappointed.”

  “Good,” said Will Wedge.

  “Good?” Peter seldom felt as though he were being whipsawed, but these Wedges were doing a pretty good job of it. Did they want to find the play or not?

  Will Wedge reached into his pocket and pulled out an envelope. “Twenty-five thousand dollars. It’s yours, Mr. Fallon. But I’ll add ten percent if you agree to say what you’ve just said to a man named Charles Price.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “My freshman roommate. I’m making a fund-raising call to him this afternoon.”

  For $2,500, Peter would be happy to spend a few hours talking to a man who collected books. He might even make a new client. And he had more to find out from Will Wedge.

  So, that afternoon, he put his son on the subway back to Boston and rode with Wedge out to Weston, a rich, green suburb about ten miles from Cambridge.

  “The guy we’re going to see dreamed up a software program that all the insurance companies use in preparing actuarial tables,” Wedge explained. “Like a license to print money. It’s time Harvard got some.”

  “And you’re the agent for the Class of ’Seventy-two?”

  “Who else could do the job as well?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. There must be a few other Harry Harvards in the class.”

  “I don’t like that term,” said Wedge. “This isn’t some rah-rah show.”

  Wedge drove for a time in silence, then said, “You know, in addition to my investment work at Wedge, Fleming, and Royce, I was once the chairman of the Back Bay Institute for Savings. But we were swallowed up by an outfit that runs its customer services from a telephone boiler room in South Carolina.”

  Peter said, “Their motto: ‘Millions for advertising, not one cent for tellers.’”

  “Back Bay was one of the oldest financial institutions in America, and it followed all those other great Boston institutions . . . right into the dumper. Think of Polaroid or Digital. And Jordan Marsh is now Macy’s. The Boston Globe is nothing more than the tenant farm of the New York Times, for God’s sake. . . .”

  “But Harvard is still Harvard?” asked Peter.

  “Harvard has been at the heart of this country’s history since the beginning. And my family has been at the heart of Harvard. Besides, it’s a special place.”

  “All that genius, all that money, all that self-importance.”

  “It’s more than that. In a country that accepts mediocrity as the norm, Harvard means excellence. That’s why your father wanted you to go there. It’s why you want your son to go. It’s why we’re visiting Price. He has what they call real ‘donative power.’”

  “You mean, he’s a soft touch?”

  “Would you call John Harvard a soft touch? Anne Radcliffe? The people of Massachusetts who supported the school with a tax on grain?”

  “The College Corn?” said Peter.

  “Right. And later, men like Rockefeller and J. P. Morgan sent their sons and their money. Now, it’s with men like us that Harvard ensures its future.”

  Peter resisted the impulse to say “rah-rah.” Instead, he said, “Maybe men like you. I’m small potatoes.”

  “Small potatoes nourish, too. And it isn’t just cash. Over the years, my family has given ideas, time . . . we even donated paintings in the thirties. A Copley, a Gilbert Stuart . . . major work. You can see them in a show they’re putting together at the Fogg in March. Treasures from the Harvard Portrait Collection. You’ll get an invitation.”

  Price lived in a big thirties Colonial with a nineties addition on the back and two sugar maples out front.

  Wedge rang the bell and said to Fallon, “Fund-raising rule number one: ‘Solicitations made in person are significantly more successful than phone calls.’”

  Price opened the door himself. He was short, square, with a thick, black mustache and thicker black-rimmed glasses. He wore a sweaty sweatsuit and looked as though he had just worked out. He was a jokester, too. “I gave already at the office.”

  Wedge answered with one of those honking laughs.

  Price led them through the foyer to the back of the house, and Peter realized where he was. This wasn’t just a big addition in an overpriced suburb. It was a library, two stories high, with mahogany ladders leading to railed balconies, Palladian windows with u.v.-filtered glass, Oriental carpets, antique desks, and leather . . . lots of leather.

  And it wasn’t just any library. It was a Shakespeare library. There were books, busts, portraits. And right in the middle of the room, beneath a spotlight: a First Folio.

  For years Peter had heard rumors of an anonymous collector living west of Boston. Anytime a book related to Shakespeare came on the market, from a first edition of Marchette Chute’s Shakespeare of London to a quarto of Coriolanus, this man outbid everyone to get it. And whenever he needed an agent, he used Bertram Lee.

  Peter walked over to the case and looked at the Folio, which was open to the engraving of Shakespeare. What a face. What a book.

  “So far, the most expensive First Folio ever purchased,” said Price.

  “From the Berland collection?” asked Peter. “Six million?”

  “A pittance,” said Price. “Now, why is one of Boston’s best-known antiquarians visiting me?”

  “Mr. Fallon has come to dash your hopes, Charlie,” said Wedge.

  Price gestured to the walls around him. “My hopes are all fulfilled.”

  “Except for one,” said Wedge. “Mr. Fallon is here to kill rumors of a certain Shakespeare play that you heard about through the booksellers’ underground.”

  “Underground? I didn’t know such a thing existed.” Price looked at Fallon. “Did you?”

  “There’s legitimate business, and there isn’t,” said Peter. “You’re either aboveground or you’re not.”

  Price sat at his desk and rested his chin in his hand, looking as if he was trying to think of something funny to say.

  Before he did, Wedge said to Fallon, “Tell him about Love’s Labours Won.”

  Fallon told Price what he had said at Lowell House: that if a play ever existed, it had burned up in the Harvard Hall fire of 1764.

  “So,” said Wedge when Peter was done, “I’m hoping the Price Foundation will release the funds currently being held for that phantom play—”

  “Twenty million,” said Price.

  “—and put it into the project we have been discussing.”

  Price looked at Peter. “What do you think, Fallon? Should I spend my mad money on something else? Or should I wait? ‘Written in the Bard’s own hand’ makes it even more attractive.”

  “Spend your money on whatever you want. But don’t count on that play.”

  They chatted a while longer, but they didn’t reveal to Fallon what the project was, and he didn’t ask. He just ogled the books.

  “Someday,” Price told Fallon as he ushered them out, “my collection will rival the Folger Library. A true reposit
ory of the greatest work in the history of humanity. I had hoped to be the man who bought a copy of a lost play.”

  On the drive home, Wedge thanked Fallon.

  “For what?”

  “For setting him straight. So he can turn to a nice donation for Harvard.”

  “What’s the project?”

  “A secret. Can’t tell you . . . yet. Not until commencement.”

  “Fair enough,” said Fallon. “But how did he know about the play?”

  Wedge shrugged, as if he were acting innocent or clueless. “The same way we’ve all known. By reading and research and speculation.”

  “Not the so-called booksellers’ underground?”

  “Well . . . that, too.”

  “Bingo Keegan?”

  “Keegan? I wouldn’t know.”

  “Why was it that on Sunday, you came down the river and asked me to stay out of this. And by the end of the week, with Ridley in his urn, you wanted me on your team?”

  “My daughter did more research. She put the name of Bleen in the commonplace book together with the Bleen-Currier-Whitney House. We thought you might be close to it. We were right. Thanks.”

  Evangeline was in his office, and the first thing she asked was “Is it over or not?”

  Bernice had gone home. Orson was examining a volume in the display room.

  Evangeline was sitting in Peter’s chair, writing an article on her laptop.

  “You’ve made yourself right at home.” He perched on the edge of his desk.

  “You have an Internet connection.” Evangeline typed a few more words, then e-mailed her article to her publisher. “‘Touring the Cape with a Grand Lady.’”

  “Your grandmother?”

  “They’ll change the title.” She closed the laptop. “So, is it over?”

  “It would seem to be, but I get the feeling I’ve been used.”

  From the display room came a hooting laugh, followed by Orson. “Of course you were used. People like Will Wedge use everyone. It’s in their upbringing.”

  “It’s almost as if the whole story was cooked up to change the mind of a major donor.”

  “Another Ridley Riddle?” said Evangeline.

  “Maybe . . . the real Ridley Riddle is: Who killed Ridley?” Peter described the day and laid out the characters he’d crossed: “Will Wedge, Dorothy Wedge, Bob O’Hill, Bertram Lee, and Charles Price, all on the same day. Who’s the important one?”

  “Bingo Keegan,” said Orson.

  “Yeah,” said Peter. “If he killed Ridley, maybe I should stay on this.”

  “No,” answered Orson. “Maybe you should stay off it.”

  Evangeline said, “I was there. I heard the detective call it an accident.”

  “Right,” said Orson, “accidental death, manuscript burned to ash two hundred and forty years ago. Case closed. On to the next.”

  “Case closed,” said Evangline. “So come with me to France. I leave tomorrow.”

  “France?”

  “Les Trois Glorioueses, the three days of the Beaune wine auction. I’d like livelier company than a female centenarian. Separate rooms, of course.”

  Peter leaned across the desk. “You and me? In France? That could be fun. But I’ll have to take a rain check.”

  “Rain check?” she said. “I just opened a door wider to you than any woman has since . . . since the last time I opened a door to you—”

  “You’re forgetting my ex-wife.”

  “And you want a rain check?”

  Orson, the soul of discretion, stepped out.

  Then Evangeline said to Peter, “This better be good.”

  “Jimmy’s Harvard application is due. He wants me to read it when he’s done.”

  She sat back. “There’s not another excuse that I’d buy.”

  “So,” he said, “how about Paris at New Year’s? Or Florida in March?”

  “By March,” she said, “I’ll be working too hard. No more articles about where to find the cleanest sheets on the Left Bank. After my grandmother saw all those women walking around Harvard the other day, she said someone should write about the Radcliffe Eight, the women who got Harvard to admit that women could be educated.”

  “And you’re going to do it?” said Peter.

  “I need something to get me out of bed in the morning, Peter.”

  He grinned. “You want something to get you out of bed, and I’d like to find something to—”

  “Don’t say another word.” And she began to gather up her things.

  He shrugged. “Can’t blame me for trying.”

  She shook her head and gave him one of those looks. But then she laughed. “Like I told my grandmother, you still haven’t grown up.”

  “You know me too well.”

  “I have to go back to New York.” She pointed a finger at him. “But I know you well enough to know that you’re still wondering. Just remember. You can’t bring Ridley back, or the manuscript. So, case closed.”

  “Case closed. On to the next. I’ll call you if it looks like fun.”

  Orson came in with a book. “Here’s the one you wanted, Evangeline. New England Verses, by Lydia Wedge. A good place to start if you’re interested in women who agitated for female education.”

  She took it and turned it over. A little volume in blue vellum.

  “Very rare,” said Orson, “and very little in demand. Not considered a great poet.”

  “But a female poet back when they were rare, too, a female poet who writes about Harvard.” She flipped through the volume. “Here’s ‘The Bell Ringer of Harvard Hall,’ about the great fire. ‘Exiled by the Mob,’ about the gunpowder riot.”

  “What was that?” asked Peter.

  “The warning the British didn’t heed a year before the American Revolution: ‘Intolerable were the Acts decreed / in the springtime of seventy-four, / Our port was closed, our rights refused, / and troops put boots on our shore.’”

  Chapter Fifteen

  1774-1783

  “OUR PORT was closed, our rights refused, / and troops put boots on our shore.”

  Lydia dipped her quill and wondered if she had chosen the best meter to capture the mood of the colony. Perhaps she should use blank verse, steady and measured. Would heroic couplets add the power of rhyme? Or should she try something more chaotic? For what was there in these chaotic days that was steady or measured? And who were the heroes? Certainly not William Brattle.

  From her bedroom window, she watched him bustling through the orchard, his favored route, for if he came in by the back door, he could stop in the kitchen, ascertain the contents of pot or grate, and—if the food met his fancy—contrive for an invitation to the next meal. Small wonder, she thought, that his nickname, Brigadier Paunch, grew ever more apt as the years went by.

  Lydia hurried downstairs to intercept him, because it was Wednesday, the day that she and her grandfather went to Boston, and she wanted no Brattle business keeping her from her weekly trip to the bookstores on Cornhill Street.

  As there was nothing cooking in the kitchen, Brattle reached Reverend Abraham’s study just ahead of her, but she thought it a good sign that her grandfather was standing and wearing his wig, for it meant that he did not intend to tarry.

  Brattle was handing a letter to Reverend Abraham. “I’d not trust this to a messenger. You assure me that you can deliver it to General Gage directly?”

  “Gage won’t turn away a member of the Mandamus Council,” said Abraham.

  “Do not proclaim such membership so loudly.” Lydia came into the room. “Some people do not approve of a council appointed by the royal governor rather than elected.”

  “Some people,” said Abraham, “should not have thrown tea into Boston Harbor, and with it, the right to conduct a civilized government.”

  Reverend Abraham Wedge was in a minority among his Congregational brethren. While Anglicans believed that power descended from the king to the archbishop to the people, Congregationalists believed that
the right of a minister to preach came from those to whom he preached.

  Abraham agreed with the principles of his church, but he did not believe they gave his brethren the right to destroy East India Company tea. Such action, he said, would lead only to chaos. And he liked tea. He had even resigned from the First Church because he could no longer serve with Reverend Appleton, who weekly preached rebellion to students already endowed by nature with a propensity to make trouble.

  For years, new taxes had been rolling in from the Atlantic, lowering over the colonies, and producing squalls of disagreement that dissipated before the breezes of conciliation. But since the December tea party, the sky had been growing steadily darker. The port of Boston had been closed. Four regiments of His Majesty’s troops had arrived. The Harvard Corporation had canceled commencement for fear of riot. And a new military governor, General Thomas Gage, had discharged the elected council and put his own hand-picked mandamus council in place.

  “Guard the letter,” said Brattle. “It warns Gage that militia companies are now prepared to meet at one minute’s notice. It also provides an accounting of what’s left in the powder house on Quarry Hill.”

  Abraham lifted the flap on his coat pocket and put the letter inside. “I hear that the Medford selectmen have removed their powder.”

  “Most towns have done the same,” answered Brattle. “Only the king’s remains.”

  “Pray that it does not ignite of its own stupidity,” said Lydia.

  Reverend Abraham Wedge had reached the age of seventy-two with an iron will forged to an iron spine, and he insisted on driving his two-seat chaise to Boston himself.

  Lydia admired the will and the spine but was uncertain of the driving, especially when Abraham saw someone he recognized and pulled the horse to a sudden stop.

  And there was Caleb Wedge, walking along Spring Street, head down, lost in thought. He had often admitted to his sister that the calculations in his head were as real to him as the horse droppings in the street. So he seemed hardly to notice when the chaise lurched up and almost pitched Lydia onto the ground in front of him.