Dame Winifred’s theory was still only a theory. Unfortunately, the catalog prepared by the second earl’s secretary had been destroyed in a fire set off by the fourth earl’s fascination with the new theory of electricity. Luckily, at least three-quarters of the Newbolt library (though not the fourth earl) had survived the accident. But without the catalog, there were no records of the original purchases of Raleigh’s books. “Wasn’t,” Theo asked her, giving his seatbelt a nervous check, “wasn’t the Newbolt Collection cataloged again in 1785?”
“Quite right, Theodore,” she gave his knee an approving tap. “And again in 1809, 1871, and every few decades or so since.”
“And none turned up a Raleigh play.”
“No. I’ve spent months at Bourne myself. Very kind of Horry Stanlow—His Lordship. I’ve found eight printed volumes that belonged to Sir Walter. But no more, and no manuscripts.” She turned and gave Theo a steely glare. “That doesn’t mean there aren’t more left at Bourne.”
“The road! The road!” he shouted, then dispensed with words and grabbed the wheel in time to avoid a startled cleric on a bicycle. “Remember: eyes skinned to the road.”
“There were two dozen sold, and only eight found,” she said, gripping the wheel.
On they sped to Bourne.
Back in the 1960s, when many of the Great Houses of Great Britain had been auctioned for taxes, or put on the Trust to keep their owners off the dole, or sold for exorbitant sums to innocent rock stars, a few of the more enterprising survivors of the nobility determined to save their ancestral seats by exploiting them as tourist attractions. They grasped the idea that, like rock stars, they had something to offer: they had their privacy. They could trade the fact of their aristocratic lives for the means to continue them. And so rather than mourn a past of endless wealth, endless land, and endless leisure, they looked to a future in which they could package that past and sell it to those who envied it. Rather than moon futilely back on feudal days when the peasants worked for them for free, they would go to work for peasants and charge for it. Longleat House led the way with its camel rides and hippos and the bloodstained waistcoat in which Charles the first had been executed. Others followed.
Dame Winifred’s friend Horatio (Horry) William St. Denis Stanlow, ninth Earl of Newbolt, was the first of his family to enter the tourist business, and by the time he did, competition had stiffened. He owned in Bourne a magnificent estate (Tudor front, Caroline wings, Capability Brown landscaping), plus the great library, a few good paintings, and some displayable knickknacks (Mary Queen of Scots’ toothpick, a lock of Byron’s hair, one of Queen Victoria’s baby shoes), but he had little capital to promote these. Nor, to his chagrin, had he any especially illustrious or interestingly vile ancestors to trade in. No one had imprisoned royalty in the Lady Chapel or hacked a relative to death in the Long Gallery at Bourne. No one had composed immortal verse in its pavilion or committed a notorious crime in its topiary garden. True, his thrice-great-aunt had corresponded with Tennyson and had written an unpublished novel about the first earl’s unfaithful wife, Countess Charlotte, entitled She Lived for Love, but no one in the family had known about the book until after the aunt had died, and no one after that had been able to finish it.
As things turned out, however, young Horry Stanlow (who had failed to distinguish himself at Oxford in anything but double sculling and dancing The Twist) was a natural business man. He began with a small admission fee to the Bourne grounds, then a separate fee for the house, then guided tours, then tour books, then—for an extra pound—a tour book personally autographed by himself or his wife, the photogenic Countess Andrea (depending on which of them was on duty). By the time he was forty, he was a Baedeker starred attraction. But what had really inspired the ninth Earl of Newbolt to greatness was the jealousy of his neighbor and contemporary, the Marquess of Urswick, who’d rowed for Cambridge. Fifteen years ago, the bilious marquess (freezing to death in his nearby Norman castle) had sneered at Newbolt for “trafficking with the hoi polloi.” Ten years ago, he had secretly installed his own ticket booth in his gateway, then a Tea Room in his stables, then a Dungeon of Medieval Torture Instruments in his armory passage. The Earl of Newbolt had retaliated with a Cafeteria in the tithe barn, a Petting Zoo beside the greenhouse, and a Costume Museum in the wine cellar. Both put in Souvenir Shoppes and sold postcards, T-shirts, Druidical crystals, and dolls of the wives of Henry the Eighth.
And so it had gone on, escalating through the years, as the earl and marquess sneaked over to each other’s estates to count the tour buses in their expanded car parks and to spy on new attractions. When Urswick imported a hundred miniature deer, Newbolt invested in two hundred free-roaming peacocks. When Newbolt claimed Elizabeth the first had eaten in his Banquet Hall, Urswick announced that Henry IV had slept in his Round Tower. As soon as there were medieval minstrels on the battlements and paddle boats in the moat of Urswick Castle, there were Shakespearean actors in the forecourt and go-carts on the Palladian bridge of Bourne House.
Horry Stanlow had been happy to have Dame Winifred Throckmorton scrounging through his library day after day looking for Raleigh’s play. In the first place, he knew her. He’d attended a few of her lectures at Oxford, though not enough to do very well on his exams. Moreover, while at her research, she not only didn’t bother the tourists, she was quite willing to answer their questions whenever they assumed she was stationed there to do so. In fact, the earl had offered to hire her as a regular. She knew more about the collection than its librarian, and certainly much more than the earl did. A lanky handsome man now in his early fifties, Stanlow was an excellent rider, angler, and ballroom dancer, but he’d never been much of a reader. None of the Stanlows had been, since the mid-eighteenth century.
That certainly didn’t mean that it wouldn’t make the ninth earl ecstatic if Dame Winifred should find on his premises an unknown play written by Sir Walter Raleigh. It would utterly destroy the Marquess of Urswick.
•••
Theo was fairly certain they’d taken another wrong turn. Long after he’d seen the high ornamental chimneys of Bourne, they had failed to reach the manor itself or anything that resembled a gatehouse, a formal drive, or even an informal drive. They seemed instead to be careening through an interminable meadowy forest, and although he knew that Inigo Jones, designer of Bourne Park, had been famous for his naturalism, these woods seemed both too wild and too big for anything planned by a human. In addition, he thought he had seen a buffalo a few kilometers back.
“Miss Throckmorton,” he ventured, “do you think it’s possible that we turned before we reached the main entrance? That little dirt road was really small. And now, to tell you the truth, we don’t appear to be on anything like a road at all.”
“It is odd,” she agreed, but kept going.
Theo’s suspicions were confirmed when they skidded down a grassy hill and found themselves about fifty feet away from a glade of low trees at the foot of which sprawled three African lions. He pulled the emergency brake almost out of its casing, and the Hillman bucked to a stop. There looked to be a dry moat, presumably a deep one, around the glade, but he couldn’t be sure. “Let’s back up,” he suggested.
Before they could do so, a tan jeep with an enclosed metal top roared up behind them, and its uniformed driver, lowering his window, screamed out it, “How the bloody hell did you get in here?”
Miss Throckmorton piped back at him, “We really have very little idea. Sorry. We’re going to Bourne House.”
“This isn’t the way!”
“We’d rather concluded that,” she admitted, replacing her glasses on her nose and restarting the engine. “Could you direct us then?”
“Safari’s not opened yet,” the man went on, red-faced. “Public’s not allowed.” He looked around nervously at the male lion who had stood up with an amazingly loud growl and was now ambling to the edge of the glade.
“There’s a dry moat around those lions, isn’t there?” Theo pushed Dame Winifred back, and shouted past her. “there’s a moat!”
“Needs to be wider,” the man yelled, and rolled up his window fast.
As if it had heard him, the lion crouched, twitched its rear, then leapt with no trouble over the ditch. He ran forward a few yards, stopped to look them over, then turned toward the jeep and growled at it.
“Jesus Christ! Back up, back up!” Theo shouted, unceremoniously grabbing Miss Throckmorton’s hand on the gear-shift and shoving it.
A foot at a time, the safari guard was lurching the jeep forward in short jerks, and using his motor to roar back at the beast.
“Too fascinating!” said Dame Winifred. “A game of territorial machismo. Challenge. Counterchallenge.”
The lion raced toward the jeep, which scooted erratically backwards. Then the jeep revved its motor and raced toward the lion, which spun sideways, wheeled around, charged, and actually got its forepaws up on the hood. The guard’s shouts of “You bastard!” could be heard through the closed windows. From their glade, the lady lions were on their feet and watching all this with interest.
Theo groaned. “I don’t think this is a game!”
“Never seen anything like it!” Dame Winifred admitted with enthusiasm. “They’re so very much like cats, aren’t they? Simply immense ones.”
By blasting his horn and bucking slowly forward, the safari guard was gradually maneuvering the lion back toward the ditch. Then, all at once, the animal appeared to lose interest completely, whether from real or feigned boredom it was impossible to say. At any rate, with the graceful disdain of a matador turning his back on a bull, it walked unhurriedly away from the jeep, jumped the ditch, and began in a flaunting manner to pace the perimeter. The concubines lay back down.
The safari guard, moving fast in reverse, rolled down enough of his window to shout at the Hillman as he went by, “Follow me!”
“Please!” Theo said.
The guard led them back to the service road, where he angrily jumped out of the jeep and asked them to notice that he was soaked in sweat from “bloomin’ terror! That bastard thinks me jeep’s after his bloody females!”
“Ah!” Dame Winifred nodded. “I see.”
Banging his fist on a No Trespassing sign, the guard delivered a temperamental lecture on the dangers of muckin’ about with lions. Then he calmed down and led the Hillman Imp around the border of the future safari park. From there, they crossed a meadow and passed alongside a lengthy watercourse in the middle of which sat an octagonal wire house where chimpanzees appeared to be watching television. At this point, the safari driver slung his jeep in a circle and motioned without slowing down that they should turn onto the gravel road ahead. “Quite right,” shouted Miss Throckmorton, waving. “You’ve been most kind.”
Finally, Theo saw civilization. A small stone church. His companion pointed at it. “Saint Michael’s.” A Palladian bridge over the River Urswick, and far down on the other bank, a cottage with a boat shed nearby. Then he saw peacocks on landscaped lawns, and little Ionic temples set among orderly arrangements of ancient oaks, and then rising in front of them, the great creamy expanse of Bourne House with its double curving balustrades and marble steps and its symmetrical rows of forty mullioned windows. It was beautiful. It was closed.
“Drat.” The elderly scholar looked at her guest. “Is it Tuesday?”
While astonishingly au courant with dates in the sixteenth century, Dame Winifred had a loose hold on the present. It was not only Tuesday, it was the first of July, and as she now recalled, the Stanlows were at Henley for the Royal Regatta. Even hardworking aristocrats must occasionally take a break.
While they stood beside the car coping with this setback, a thin young man on a go-cart roared out of an arched gate off the east wing. Strapped ’round his neck was a video camcorder. With a spray of gravel, he stopped beside them, took off his helmet, and shook out an abundance of resplendent red curls. “Hal-loo, Freddie.” He smiled. “Looking for the pater familius? Bummer for you. Off to the races with Mum.”
“Pater familiae,” Dame Winifred corrected automatically, then introduced Lord William de Montpasson Stanlow, the earl-to-be. “Your Lordship,” said Theo.
“Willie,” said the teenager. “American? Awesome shades.”
While asking Theo about his chances of getting into U.S.C. where he could major in movie-making, Lord William escorted them inside through a forty-foot Palladian cube of fluted marble columns with gilt capitals and a ceiling of painted cherubs in chariots. They walked along the carpet runners through roped-off waiting rooms and sitting rooms and dining rooms and state rooms and numberless other sorts of rooms. “A hundred fourteen all together,” explained Willie, trained in the tour. “Course, we’re all crammed in the East Wing.” In the Vanbrugh Chamber, they came upon two blue-jeaned young women sprawled on silk sofas watching MTV on a television hidden in a Chinese cabinet beneath what looked like a Constable landscape. These girls were introduced as Lady Caroline and Lady Anne, Willie’s older sisters. The three Stanlow children were alone in the house (except for a skeletal staff of a dozen or so), and clearly enjoying the once-a-week opportunity to lounge about on furniture otherwise being stared at by hordes of tourists. During the brief polite chat, the two female teenagers—either because they had been sexually overstimulated by too many lurid music videos or because they rarely saw any live young males close up—stared at Theo with such undisguised if speechless enthusiasm that Miss Throckmorton asked them if they thought they’d met him before. This provoked explosive efforts to mask uncontrollable giggling and the comment from Willie that his sisters were brain-dead.
After a few more questions about U.S.C., Willie left his two visitors in the library and hurried back outside to get some footage of his father’s new zebras. He was making a documentary he called To the Manner Bourne, which he planned to submit to his tutor at Eton in place of his honors essay.
“I’m not sure that I approve.” Dame Winifred frowned at the tall skinny boy. “To think clearly, one must write clearly…as I gather your father’s tutor often told him, or as often as he attended his tutorials.” She gave a sharp tug to her misbuttoned jacket. “Regrettably, those occasions must have been rare.”
The son was unremorseful. “Now admit it, Freddie. You said Shakespeare would have been off to Hollywood in a shot…Very-happy-to-have-met-you-Mr.-Ryan,” he added with rote formality. Theo made him a present of the Day-Glo sunglasses. “Hey, totally super,” said the future earl. “Anyone ever tell you you look a bit like Gary Cooper in the early stuff?”
“Well, actually, people do,” Theo admitted. “Actually, the playwright Ford Rexford told me that, and he knew Cooper.”
This information won Willie over completely. “Ford Rexford wrote Preacher’s Boy. It’s one of my favorite movies.”
“Did you ever see the play?”
“It was a play?”
“First,” smiled Theo.
The Bourne library, with its medallioned Adam ceiling, was not quite as large as the main reading room of the Cavendish University Library, but the furnishings were much more handsome and the collection of nine thousand books far more valuable. Theo touched illuminated manuscripts and first editions of everyone from Spenser to Austen. He looked at a Plutarch in which, according to Dame Winifred, the underscoring and the crabbed notes in the margins had been scribbled by Raleigh himself.
And as Theo traced his fingers over the coarse stained rag paper, the fantasy of Jonas Marsh’s that had buzzed around his bed last night came back to him. And not as tentatively this time, but as a full-blown possibility bursting like a skyrocket inside his head. All dur
ing the ride back to Barnet-on-Urswick, he was so busy fighting with this thought that he scarcely noticed Dame Winifred’s driving except when someone honked at her. Possibilities kept sparking in his brain all during their late supper together at the Nightingale and didn’t stop as he walked her home along Gate Row.
Moonlight glittered on the slate roofs and up from the cobblestones. Above them, the moon was full and large. “Lovely Cynthia,” the old woman said. “And a lovely day too, Theodore.”
“I’ll never forget it. Miss Throckmorton, I have a proposal for—”
Suddenly from The Heights, a dog gave a deep howling bark. “Ah, there’s Mildred, peeking round her curtain, I dare say.” Dame Winifred pointed. “See her up there?” She waved. “Mildred, good evening!” The light vanished from the dormer window.
By the gate of Lark Cottage, the black cat Water (Raleigh’s nickname) stretched himself slowly atop the stone wall, lashed his tail back and forth, then pounced down and with a mew, rubbed against Theo’s pants leg. Dame Winifred snorted. “I should be honored if I were you. Wat doesn’t much care for anyone, actually. A nasty, contemptuous creature.” She leaned over and swept up the cat, who stuck a claw delicately into her hand. “As you see.” Resting Wat on the high waist of her stomach, she scratched the twitching black ears.
Sticking his hands in his pockets, Theo began again. “I have a proposal. Would you consider letting me help you look for this Raleigh play? I have to go to London for a while, but otherwise I’m just at loose ends all summer, and if you wouldn’t mind, I could come back next month and maybe be of some use.” The cat turned its head; the yellow eyes glinted at the American as insolently as if it knew exactly what he was considering.
Accept his help? Nothing would please Dame Winifred more. She was quite moved. She was delighted. And nothing could be easier than to lend him copies of her notes and computations and catalogs, and copies of all the architectural drawings made of Bourne House at each successive stage of its history, beginning in the sixteenth century. They could make them in the morning at the photocopier’s in Salisbury, for she insisted on driving him that far on his journey. They could even lunch together at the White Hart Inn, where Raleigh had been arrested. Theo accepted with pleasure.
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