Foolscap

by Michael Malone

  “All English.” Theo smiled, and picking back up his luggage and her tam, took as deep a breath as she.

  “Right then. Thank you, yes, my hat. Here we are. Hope it suits.”

  Theo looked up at the half-timbered front, at the painted sign of the nightingale hanging above the black nail-studded door. It suited perfectly. He even was given the room, up worn steep stairs and around dark narrow corners, the room with open casements and carved canopy bed where Charles the first might have slept (if sleep he could—said the dramatizing proprietor—with Cromwell’s army close on his heels).

  In the Spirits & Victuals Room of the Nightingale, Theo and Dame Winifred ate their late supper beneath a low black-beamed ceiling bowed under the weight of years and dark with centuries of soot. She confessed that she ate there nearly every night, finding cooking “a bore when it works, and a mess when it doesn’t.” When he saw that above the huge fireplace hung a small grimy painting of Sir Walter Raleigh, he was sure she came here for that reason too, and asked her if she thought whoever had put it there could have known that Spenser had called Raleigh “the summer’s nightingale.”

  “I should like to think so, Theodore, but no. May I call you Theodore?”

  “Please do,” he said.

  Hazardously sawing away at a thick lamb chop, she went on. “Fact is, a quarter of the shops in this area have his pictures in them. See his face on mugs, plates, jumpers, the lot.” She speared the meat, which had flown off her plate after too vigorous a saw, back onto her fork. “Have more chips and sprouts. Potatoes, my weakness.” She was, in fact, a voracious eater of everything available and finished off the heavy meal with two servings of batter pudding swimming in rich Devonshire cream.

  With all the food, several pints of bitters, and the exertions of his journey, Theo was feeling very drowsy by now (it was eleven), and he occasionally lost track of his indefatigable companion’s words. They were talking about Raleigh’s epic poem, the ostensibly massive Cynthia, of which only fragments survived. She agreed that the fragments were all there had ever been; that, unlike his steady friend Spenser, Raleigh was too easily distracted, too “flipperty-gibbety a bird” ever to have written a poem as long as he’d claimed he’d written; that, in a word, he’d lied, “not the first time, and certainly not the last.” It was then that Dame Winifred, wiping clots of cream from her vest front, said something that jarred Theo to attention.

  She said, “No sense looking for that poem. Total sham. What I do think the man wrote, Theodore, is a play.” She smiled secretively, almost sheepishly, at him.

  He stared at her a moment. “You believe Raleigh wrote a play?”

  “No one agrees, of course. Thought me utterly senile when they pensioned me off. My brains all broken, as poor Walter said of himself in a histrionic moment—one of far too many, the rascal.”

  “That’s ridiculous. Your brains are—well, you should hear my colleague Jonas Marsh talk about your brains. He—”

  “Ah, Marsh, Marsh. Yes. Excellent job editing the Congreve. Of course, I have a few quibbles, but—”

  “See? I’ve never met anyone who so lives her work as you.”

  Dame Winifred placed her hand tentatively to her temple, as if to reassure herself that all was well inside. “I suppose I do ‘live my work,’ as you nicely put it. In these times, I find so many of the younger scholars do not. They live their careers. Which is, you know, rather different, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, it is.” Two things should be said about Theo Ryan’s emotions at the moment. First, he felt a strong affection for this old woman rise within him, and second, he felt a curiosity so intense about the possibility of a real Raleigh play that it temporarily blocked from his thoughts the fact of his own Raleigh play. To that extent did his admiration for Dame Winifred’s scholarship reach—if she thought something so, against all evidence, perhaps it was so. “But never performed?” he asked.

  “Expect not. And a prose play. Not an early play, not when his little friends Kyd and Marlowe were scribbling them. But in the Tower, toward the end. Sixteen sixteen, even ’18. Fourteen years the bird was caged, and forced to sit down at a desk. Had to write his way back onto the great stage. You know the man couldn’t live without an audience. Look at the incredible quantity of prose he produced locked up.”

  “But LeFranc doesn’t list anything resembling a play in Raleigh’s canon. Wouldn’t it have shown up in the Remains? Or been mentioned by the early biographers? I mean, he was such a cult figure early on, and there was so much copying of his manuscripts, and circulating, surely—”

  “I think it was sent with his immediate effects—” She shuddered. “Including, dear God, the man’s head—to his widow.”

  Theo sipped at his cold coffee. “Because of all his theatrical rhetoric? ‘Our graves…drawn curtains when the play is done,’ and the rest? His self-dramatizing? Therefore you think he was writing a play?”

  “Oh, rubbish. I’m a scholar, man, not a psychoanalyst.” Her eyes glittered behind the spectacles. “I think it because I have a letter from Elizabeth Throckmorton in which she says so.”

  Theo put the cup down. “She says so?”

  “In context, that construction is indicated.”

  “But it couldn’t be an extant play.”

  Dame Winifred Elizabeth Throckmorton licked a last bit of cream from her spoon. “It might be.”

  “You’ve looked for a manuscript?”

  “Fifteen years. Eight years, since my retirement.” Taking off her glasses, she rubbed tiredly at her eyes. “Frankly, Theodore, if I could find it, I could die quite contentedly, I think. I should know I’d made…a difference.”

  “Oh, how can you say that! When you’ve already made such a huge difference. You’ve given so much to other scholars. You’ve changed the field!” Theo was moved to touch her hand, which she acknowledged with a brisk pat.

  “Yes, I suppose. But this, you see, is…rather special to me.”

  “But the likelihood of actually finding it at this point, Miss Throckmorton! It’s impossible.”

  “Oh dear no,” she said, and turned her eyes to the dark portrait of Raleigh above the fire. “I expect if he wants me to find it, I will.”

  Chapter 22

  The Manor Bourne

  All this was mine, and was taken from me unjustly.

  —Sir Walter Raleigh, passing Sherborne on his way to the Tower

  While Foolscap hadn’t been at the front of Theo’s mind at dinner, he hadn’t lain long in (possibly) Charles the first’s high carved-oak bed before he started to think of it. And as he did, a thought began buzzing like a gnat around his head, keeping him from sleep. It came at first as a pleasant fantasy of revenge. What a fool he could make of Mr. W.F.D. The thought was next shrewdly disguised (even from himself) as an act of charity. Dame Winifred expected to find a play Raleigh had written in the Tower. She believed in a strange magical way that Raleigh wanted her to find it. She had been mocked for her belief. Old and slighted, she hadn’t long to live, and would die happier if she were proved right. But that there was such a play was, frankly, improbable. Just as unlikely the chance of finding it now even if it had existed.

  Foolscap was about Sir Walter Raleigh writing a play about himself in the Tower. What if Foolscap had actually been Raleigh’s play, the way Jonas Marsh had talked about what-if-Bolt-had-written-A-Man for-All-Seasons-so-that…? What a gift to Dame Winifred, what a revenge on her detractors!

  “Americans shouldn’t try this sort of thing,” had said “W.F.D.” “You simply can’t write plays like this in the twentieth century.”

  All right, assume that London producer was right. In that case, it was unlikely that anyone would ever produce Foolscap. Well then, why not say it wasn’t from this century? Why not say it was by the man who had first claimed America for England, five hundred years ago? As long as the characters in F
oolscap were the creations of some twentieth-century nobody called Theo S. Ryan, they might never find themselves on a stage. But imagine their fates if their author were the great Elizabethan? Or even might be the great Elizabethan? Beyond doubt, if Dame Winifred accepted the authenticity of the play, a dozen other Raleigh scholars would deny it, if only from envy and contentiousness. And the controversy itself would be enough to lure producers. Maybe academic rivals would rush to the fray: Marston or Webster scholars might claim Foolscap for their author, or Bacon, or even…maybe Shakespeare scholars would wonder if it were just possible that, off in his Stratford retirement, the Bard had…

  “Oh for God’s sake,” Theo muttered aloud. “You’re out of your mind!” He turned over, yanking twisted sheets and comforter with him. What a stupid fantasy. Wait’ll he told Jonas. It could never be done. It shouldn’t be done. What a horrible thing to do to Dame Winifred even if he could, which he couldn’t. He could never fool her. And if he did and got caught (which of course he would), his career would be over. His career? He’d probably go to jail. “You jerk,” Theo snorted at himself, and pulled the feathery pillow over his head. Finally, he fell asleep trying to remember the name of the eighteenth-century man who’d plagiarized a Shakespeare play he’d called Vortigern and Rowena, and who’d seen it laughed off the stage opening night at the Drury Lane.

  The next morning, Theo chuckled over what he thought of as midnight mind-racing. Dame Winifred had collected him early at the Nightingale in a squat, snub-nosed Hillman Imp so clawed with scratches that he wondered if it had been the victim of nailwielding vandals. By eight, they were on their way in this vehicle to Dorset, where he was, to her gratification, suitably moved by his tour of Sherborne despite the fact that so many alterations had been made in the manor house after King James took it away from the condemned Raleigh and made a present of it to his boyfriend. And to Theo, the heraldic inscription above the immense alabaster fireplace, Deo Non Fortuna (By God, not by Fortune), sounded like the next tenants’ slap at Raleigh’s sense of his own grandiose destiny; or perhaps they’d meant it defensively—a public denial that they were vultures, battening on the decay of a better man. But Raleigh’s dream was in Sherborne’s design, still carved in the ceilings, still crouching in the stone roebucks upon the roof, and there were galleries and gardens where one could feel the great Elizabethan still in the air.

  Thrilling in a different way was riding in Miss Throckmorton’s old Imp up and down the B roads of the hilly Dorset countryside, for her driving bore, in its rash and myopic exuberance, all too striking a resemblance to that of Mr. Toad from The Wind in the Willows. Theo was continually slamming his foot into the floorboard as lorries rumbled toward them on what a flood of adrenaline insisted was the wrong side of the road. Moreover, many of these roads were so narrow that at their widest, two cars could pass only if each veered halfway into the shouldering hedgerows—while at their narrowest, a single car was thunked by bushy branches on both sides. High and brambly and unending, these hedgerows hid not only any view of the ostensibly lovely country side, but any ditches into which a tire might suddenly plummet. As far as Theo could tell, what the green and pleasant land of England looked like from a car’s eye view was a solid green wall of—hedgerows.

  Whatever the logistics of British driving, Dame Winifred had not mastered them. For one thing, she couldn’t see (for she had broken one stem off her glasses, so that they kept falling into her lap). For another, she went too fast and often on the wrong (that is, the right) side of the road. For another, she often went on the wrong road. And this despite the fact that by her own admission she had traveled between Barnet-on-Urswick and Sherborne “a thousand times.” Obviously, thought Theo, never by the same route twice. “Sorry, my error,” she would say, attempting last-minute jackknifing maneuvers. After piping shrilly, “Sheer stupidity!” she backed up in a fairly busy roundabout, and muttering, “I’d rather expected the B 3297 here,” she shot off onto what she was sure was an unpaved lane, but which turned out, a mile of bumps and cow piles later, to be clearly posted as a footpath.

  She had what might have been the good habit of beeping her horn, had she not been more likely to do it going down inclines than on the upgrades when it might have been a useful warning to indignant tractors chugging over the crest or flocks of intransigent sheep meandering around curves. “Right then,” she would say, weaving in reverse backward down the hill with hawthorn branches thwack, thwack, thwacking against the mirror outside Theo’s door.

  Throughout their trip, she was happy to fill him in about this possible lost play of Sir Walter Raleigh’s, but during explanations of how she had traced Throckmorton papers to this place or lost track of that trail, she occasionally lost track of the highway, too. While fulminating against King James for throwing Bess Throckmorton out of Sherborne, she missed her turnoff for Wyatt’s grave. An analysis of records of sale for Raleigh’s sea charts—and she’d missed the town of Crewkerne, where she’d planned to show him a fifteenth-century grammar school. The story of how, after Raleigh’s death, Bess had had to beg the king repeatedly to give her the books left behind in the Tower cell—and they’d run out of petrol.

  Over lunch, Theo’s guide decided upon “a scoot down to Budleigh” to show him the thatched farmhouse of Hayes-Barton where Raleigh had been born, and to let him “sniff the air” at the red-cuffed coast where Raleigh and his half-brother must have stood as boys, gazing out at an unmapped ocean that was to carry them off to glory, and in the end, in different ways, was to kill them. Miss Throckmorton parked a little closer to those cliffs than Theo would have preferred, and after some treacherous geargrinding and tire-shredding, they were obliged to ask three stocky fishermen to help lift the rear wheel off a large rock.

  Theo determined, as he changed the tire, to take a more active role in their travels. “If we are headed west,” he therefore inquired as they set forth, “should the sun really be behind us?”

  “Absolutely right, I’m muddled again.” She grabbed at the spectacles hanging sideways on her nose, and shoved them in place. “Just turn about then—” And with screaming tires, the little green Hillman Imp sluiced in and out of marshy meadow grass. “There now! One must keep one’s eyes skinned to the road, mustn’t one?”

  Theo wholeheartedly agreed.

  At the end of a terrifying search for her pocket watch, she announced, “It’s only half past five. I think we have time for Bourne. And it’s quite close to home. Let’s just find the A thirty-five, shall we? We’ll hurry along.”

  A glance at the speedometer suggested that Miss Throckmorton was already hurrying along at one hundred twenty kilometers an hour, but he decided that in the glaring sun, his angle of vision must be deceiving. “Bourne?” he said, and slipped on the pair of sunglasses with Day-Glo green rims that he’d purchased in a hurry at Newark Airport.

  “Bourne House. Seat of the Earl of Newbolt. Just the Devon side.”

  “Oh, yes. The Newbolt Library’s there. I’ve seen pictures of Bourne House.”

  “Lovely, isn’t it?”

  “We turn just ahead, I believe. The A thirty-five? Left, Miss Throckmorton. turn left!”

  Tire squeals, and a burly fist shaken out the window of a passing dairy van. “Thank you very much. Exactly the road we want,” said Dame Winifred. “So you see, Theodore, when Lady Raleigh was forced to go live with her Throckmorton relatives in West Horsley, she took with her what manuscripts, scientific instruments, and so forth she’d managed to salvage from the jackals. And to make ends meet, she and Carew (their poor son Carew, of course) sold off Raleigh’s effects bit by bit. Publishers were quite eager for the papers, and collectors for any souvenir. Carew even peddled medicinal receipts. ‘In my father’s hand,’ he made sure to point out. Raleigh was, what would you say today?, a ‘superstar.’ People adored him.”

  “At times. He was booed at his trial.”

  “By scum.” She b
rushed them away angrily. “And, of course, he went to the scaffold so magnificently. I quite agree that when the Stuarts killed Sir Walter Raleigh, they condemned themselves to death.” Her grim face suggested that the Stuarts had gotten what they deserved.

  “But some of these papers Lady Raleigh kept.”

  “Until the day she died. Eighty-two she was. Three years my senior.” The old woman was quiet a moment, her crooked fingers gently patting the steering wheel. “And when she did die, in 1647, a large lot of Raleigh’s books (including many he’d looted from the Spanish in Cadiz) got bought by Francis Stanlow—”

  “The first earl.”

  “Then just a young popinjay companion of Charles the first. When Charles the Second returned to the throne, he made this fellow Earl of Newbolt in gratitude—as you know—for the man’s loyalty to his father. He also gave him Bourne Manor after evicting the current tenant.”

  Theo said, “Home improvement was a rather chancy affair back in those days, wasn’t it?”

  “My dear,” she snorted, “survival was a rather chancy affair. If that pig Henry the Eighth wanted your abbey, he simply chopped off your head.”

  Dame Winifred had spent the eight years of her retirement tracing the dispersal of Raleigh’s large library and his literary effects. She had deduced from her research that if there was a lost play, chances were it had been bundled in with the volumes bought by the first Earl of Newbolt. For, after a dissipated youth, this man had apparently turned into an insatiable reader, or at least an insatiable collector of books, and by his middle years, had become so obsessed with his bibliophilic hobby that his wife, the infamous Countess Charlotte, had been able to indulge in a series of love affairs (one of them the subject of a play by a famous Restoration wit) without the bookish earl ever noticing her late hours.