Foolscap

by Michael Malone

  Then, “Good night. And thank you,” he said.

  “Good night, Theodore. I feel very, very excited about our prospects for success.” She squeezed Wat to her breast. “Fresh blood. New possibilities. If a play exists, we shall find it.”

  “I think we will,” he told her, reaching out his hand for hers. The black cat hissed at him.

  Theo was too agitated to go back to his room. His long legs led him quickly down the High Street, arms swinging across his chest in a nervous flurry of motion. At the arched stone bridge, he paused and leaned over, gripping the ledge. Below him, the moon floated quietly on the black water of the Urswick. He took a long, slow breath. “It’s possible,” he whispered.

  In the months before he’d begun writing Foolscap, he had read over and over every extant word Raleigh had ever put to paper. As a scholar, he knew that there wasn’t a phrase or allusion or syntactical construction in his play that couldn’t have been written by Raleigh in 1618. But would anyone believe that it had been written by Raleigh in 1618? Would a great scholar like Dame Winifred Throckmorton believe it? Oh, she would want to believe it. The Earl of Newbolt would want her to believe it. Was it possible that she could?

  That Walter Raleigh was conceited enough and imaginative enough to make himself the hero of his own play, she could probably accept. That, once condemned to certain death, he would write so darkly about his enemies, would lie so extravagantly about his triumphs—that much she would probably not only accept, but relish. But would she believe it was good enough? Of course, it didn’t have to be as good as the best of Raleigh. An old man, after all, debilitated, stressed; an only play. And great poets had written rotten plays before; look at Keats and Shelley.

  Besides, it wasn’t a rotten play. It was a good play. It deserved a chance. Dame Winifred deserved a chance. Oh, come on, Theo, be honest; you wouldn’t be doing it for her. Well, what if he showed her his play and asked her to help him pass it off as Raleigh’s? The two of them against the neglectful scholarly world. This appealing fantasy faded with an image of withering indignation on Miss Throckmorton’s face. She’d be horrified if she knew he’d even thought about this! Even just as a hoax. Even just to see if he could…

  The sky spangled with stars above the dark stone houses of the village. Theo paced the bridge and told himself he was crazy. “With intent to deceive.” That made it forgery. A disgrace to scholarship. And that’s what he was, wasn’t he? A scholar. A teacher, a critic, a biographer. He wasn’t a playwright. He wasn’t a Ford Rexford. He’d often asked Ford why he kept writing, and the playwright had told him, “To stop all these goddamn people yammering in my head. To build them someplace better to live than the world they got.” And another time he’d answered, “Why do you fuck? ’Cause it feels good.” Of course, on different occasions, Ford had given other answers: “To make a buck” and “To tell ’em Kilroy was here.” But Theo suspected that the first two responses were the real ones. And while he’d felt them both himself while writing his play, he wasn’t sure he had the stamina to feel them constantly. Then, so what if it was unlikely that anyone would ever produce Foolscap? So what if he never saw it on a stage?

  Theo took coins from his pocket and jiggled them from one hand to the other. Face it, he thought. You aren’t going to do it because you don’t have the guts. You’re not that wild. It’s people like Ford, people like Walter Raleigh, who do things that crazy.

  When they’d been working together on Foolscap, Ford had said of its hero, “Know what I love about Mr. Strut? The bet-it-all chutzpah of the guy. And you caught it in this thing, Theo, you did. Raleigh’s boldness. Like when they come to arrest him so he quick takes these potions, goes into convulsions, foaming at the mouth, spouting gibberish. Drool in that long matted white hair. The guy cops an insanity plea. Right on the spot. Then when he’s found out, he cites biblical precedence! ‘Hey. King David did it, didn’t he?’”

  “It didn’t work,” Theo had reminded the playwright.

  “He had a million schemes just as good. If I hadn’t been held back—”

  “You were held back, Ford?”

  “Pusillanimity. Guilt. Sloth. Hooch and cooze. I’m riddled with neuroses. I don’t kid myself. Dark of night, I don’t. But if I’d had the balls to name my ship the Destiny—I love it—”

  “You too could have ended up on the scaffold.”

  “But oh Lord, how that guy could write a death scene! He even starts directing the fucking executioner: ‘What dost thou fear? Strike, man, strike!’ Bold, Theo. Think bold.”

  Yes, one of Raleigh’s ships had been named Destiny, and another, Revenge. For destiny, for revenge.

  Well, wouldn’t it be interesting at least to find out if it were possible? And, of course, he’d tell Dame Winifred before she took any public step. “See how well you taught me Raleigh,” he’d say.

  Leaning over the bridge, Theo shook his head, smiling, and threw the coins in a spray of silver out into the Urswick.

  Twenty minutes later, the big American stood stooped in the red telephone box across the street from the Stag & Hart pub, speaking with an exhausted-sounding Jonas Marsh at his London hotel. “I called Vic and he said you got back this afternoon, Jonas. How was Scotland?”

  “My feet are in a bucket of Epsom salts,” was the answer. “How’s the Aged D? With her now?”

  “Dame Winifred? She’s wonderful. Just what you’d expect.”

  “Didn’t expect a thing. So, Ryan, you find Ford Rexford?” Marsh sounded preoccupied, perhaps by his feet.

  “No, but I got back from him what I came for.”

  Marsh’s tone was distinctly ironic. “Miss Harte? The sweet Corinna gone a-Maying, and obviously a-Juneing and Julying?”

  “Jonas, come on. No! Listen, I need to talk to you about something important. How much do you know about transcriptions of sixteenth-, seventeenth-century manuscripts? I mean technically, orthographically?”

  “A great deal.”

  “That’s what I figured.”

  “A very great deal, frankly.” Marsh was recovering his energy. “A damnable sight more than our new chairman, Thorney the Swine-Faced Yahoo Toady, knows about medieval anything!”

  “Yes, well, I’ve got a proposal for you, Jonas. Your idea about passing off a twentieth-century play as genuinely Jacobean.”

  “My idea about what?”

  “You know, passing off A Man for All Seasons.”

  “Bit late for that, isn’t it?”

  “Not that, but…Look, I don’t want to talk about this on the phone, Jonas. Can we have lunch tomorrow? I could meet you at your hotel.”

  Jonas said that he wouldn’t be in London tomorrow. It was his invariable habit to attend the Royal Regatta at Henley, and he was “motoring” there in the morning.

  “You’ve rented a car?”

  “I own a car.”

  “In England?”

  “It happens,” said Marsh obliquely.

  “Well, could I meet you at Henley then?” Theo was frightened that if he postponed this talk, he’d come to his senses and never have it.

  “Something wrong, Ryan?” (It was a surprise to hear concern in his colleague’s voice; Theo had never before associated what you might call relational emotions with Jonas Marsh.) “Something to do with this Rexford obsession?”

  “Who said I was obsessed with Rexford?”

  “Steve Weiner. We had lunch in New York. Inedible slop.”

  “How is Blabbermouth?”

  “Miscegenation bound. La belle Jorvelle.” Marsh cackled. “When that gossip slithers up the tower of the Poodle-Fornicator Tupper and into the long-lobed ear of Dina Sue-Wee Ludd, I hope to hear the howls across the Atlantic. Yap, soo-wee, soowee, yap, yap!”

  “Well, look, this play thing I need to talk to you about has got nothing to do with Rexford. It has to do with Winifred Thr
ockmorton.”

  “Ah.”

  And so they arranged to meet at three the following afternoon in front of the Steward’s Gate at the Henley Regatta. Marsh was attending with “a friend” who could provide tickets. After the races, they’d return to London together; meanwhile, Marsh would reserve a room for Theo in his London hotel. “You’ll prefer it to that scrofulous flea-trap you were in last week,” Marsh predicted.

  “It’s not too expensive, is it, Jonas? I don’t have your kind of money.” (Whatever kind of money it was that Jonas Marsh had, which no one had ever figured out.)

  “Don’t worry about it. Cheerio, Ryan, ta ta, and au revoir. My feet are shriveling.”

  As it happened, Theo made one more phone call that night, not one he’d had the slightest thought of making until he was sitting with the half-dozen other patrons in the dark, sleepy pub, the Stag & Hart, having what Ford Rexford used to call “the unwind whiskey.” He was thinking about Ford, about how he’d felt when Ford had told him his play was good. How he’d felt those next few days working on it, learning from Ford.

  There was a jukebox in the barroom between two video game machines, and a pretty black-haired young woman in corduroy slacks kept playing the same bluesy song while she shot down planes on the video screen. She looked lonely and the song sounded lonely. Involved as he was in his thoughts, Theo might not have noticed the jukebox if he hadn’t been thinking about Ford and if the woman hadn’t looked so sad. When he did faintly hear the singer’s voice—a tough, smoky, voluptuous voice—he thought it sounded familiar only because it was a voice from the American South. But then he thought, she sounds like somebody familiar. Who does she sound like? Then just as the song ended with a sad, sexy twang of a guitar chord, goosebumps prickled the hair on the back of his neck. He knew who it was. It was Rhodora.

  “Excuse me?” He hurried over to the jukebox. “That song. Who was singing it?”

  The woman looked up, startled, at the tall, sunburned American. Then, “It’s new,” she said. “Country Western. From the U.S. Joe likes ’em. They just changed these records today.” She called over to the bartender, who was talking with two men about a soccer match. “Today, right, Joe? Jukebox feller come in today?”

  “That’s right,” Joe said. “Come this noon.”

  “‘I Go On.’ That’s the name of it.” The woman’s sad hard-edged smile stayed on her face as she watched Theo.

  He ran his finger down the columns of songs on the jukebox front until his hand stopped at the words “Rhodora Potts. ‘I Go On.’” “Jesus, I knew it!” he said. “I know her!” According to the label, Rhodora had written the song herself. On the flip side was her version of “Dancing in the Streets,” which he’d often heard her singing at Cherokee’s with the Dead Indians. It was a Nashville label; it must be the little company that had wanted to record her back in the spring. And here she was in July on a jukebox in Barnet-on-Urswick, England. “God Almighty!” Theo said. “And she didn’t change her name, either. She always said she wouldn’t. I know her,” he repeated.

  “Really?” the woman asked.

  “Really.” He lifted his whiskey glass in a toast to the jukebox.

  The woman looked up a long instant into Theo’s eyes. “Tell her from me I know how she feels.”

  Joe walked to their end of the bar. “Buck up, Steph,” he grinned. “Could be worse. Not so bad as all that.”

  “Isn’t it now?” she asked him.

  Still shaking his head with the surprise of it, Theo pulled a chair over to the jukebox to listen to Rhodora sing, “I Go On.”

  Remember you?

  I don’t want to, but I guess I do.

  You’ve gone on to love somebody new.

  I go on and on with missing you.

  Remember you?

  I don’t want to, but I guess it’s true.

  When I’m dreaming, you and I aren’t through.

  I go on and on with kissing you.

  I go on and on and on.

  As soon the song ended, Theo played the other side. Then he walked back out to the phone booth and called his home number in Rome, North Carolina.

  A machine answered, sounding very clear from across the ocean, and very brief. “Hi, Theo Ryan’s in England all summer. You wanna leave a message for Rhodora Potts, do it at the beep. Bye.”

  “Hi, Rhodora. It’s Theo. Where are you? I just heard ‘I Go On’! Goddammit, why didn’t you tell me it was out! I’m in a little village in Devonshire, and it’s on the jukebox. Congratulations! Well, I’ll try you again later. I’ll be here and there for a while. You can leave a message for me at Brown’s Hotel in London, okay? Look, I haven’t found him. You still want me to? Bye. Congratulations. I miss you. Bye.”

  Through the open window of the Stag & Hart, he could hear Rhodora’s song starting again. He went back inside the pub and invited the young woman named Stephanie to join him for a drink.

  Many drinks later, they walked together to her flat above a stationer’s shop that hung out over the moonlit cobbles of the High. He kept thinking of Rhodora.

  Chapter 23

  A Great Procession

  ’Tis better to be fortunate than wise.

  —Webster, The White Devil

  It was a hot, sunny day in Henley-on-Thames. The rain had finally arrived in the night, revived the flowers, then politely left. Crisp blue-and-white awnings fluttered on the Regatta pavilions. Light glittered on the river, mud glistened on the walkways. Theo Ryan and Jonas Marsh sat in their white chairs, chatting as they looked at the crowd.

  “You’ll never get away with it,” said Marsh.

  “But you told me—”

  “Oh, yes, yes, Ryan, ink and paper, et cetera, can be managed.”

  “I’m telling you, that London producer didn’t read my play. He rejected it on the subject matter. If he did glance at a page or two, he won’t remember, and on the off chance he does, we’ll get Ford—”

  “We?”

  “—to say he’d gotten hold of the Raleigh manuscript right when it was found, and he’d sent a copy to the guy as a hoax: to see a producer’s face when he realized he’d turned down a play by Sir Walter Raleigh! That sounds like something Ford would do. But I swear, Jonas, the man just flipped through a few pages. If that.”

  “I’m not talking about some idiot producer or—”

  “What then? Ford?”

  “Well, he certainly knows Raleigh didn’t write it.”

  “He’ll love the idea of fobbing off a forgery on the academy. He loves being ‘bad.’”

  Marsh crossed his legs, crisping the crease of his white trousers. “What if he gets bored and decides to be ‘bad’ by exposing us?”

  “I’ll blackmail him into keeping his mouth shut. Besides, he’s such a notorious liar, who’d believe him?”

  “Beyond Rexford—”

  “Don’t say the play’s not good enough, because you haven’t even read it yet.”

  “I don’t necessarily doubt you, Ryan.”

  “Is it the idea of doing it? The moral question? I know, I know. I mean, God knows, Jonas, I can’t believe I’m—”

  “The moral question is interesting, but arguable. It’s technically that the thing is close to impossible. A) The Bourne library is very carefully documented. Winifred Throckmorton knows every single—”

  “I told you. We don’t put it in the library. We don’t even put it in the house. When you see the maps, you’ll—”

  “B) The manuscript itself. You’ll never get away with a holograph. A forgery of Raleigh’s own foul papers would be spotted in minutes. Besides, the man’s whoreson handwriting is unbearable.”

  “A fair copy then.”

  “Then? If.”

  “Okay, okay. If.”

  “It would have to be a transcript. And not by Raleigh’s sec
retary, either. Talbot’s hand’s too well known. An anonymous amanuensis. Early though. Sixteen twenties? Family clerk? I don’t know. Perhaps Mole can help.”

  “He can? How?”

  “Please! Let me think about this. And don’t talk to me about it anymore now, Ryan, will you? I have to read the play first, don’t I? When it comes down to it, ‘the play’s the thing,’ isn’t it? If the play doesn’t work, nothing works.”

  “But if you think the play can pull it off?”

  Marsh looked dubious. “I’ll think about it. Now, we’re here to bloody well enjoy ourselves. There’s a hat!” He pointed at a short woman in pink silk who was entirely shaded by an enormous aquamarine hat with pink blossoms bunched at its band. “Givenchy, I expect.”

  The American academics sat back to analyze the Henley crowd. They agreed they had never before in their lives seen so many blue-eyed, pink-faced, well-off, well-dressed drunk people together in one soggy field. Of course, not everyone among the thousands gathered by the riverbanks was rich. Among the spectators in the public grandstand down the way, there must have been some who were pressed for cash. And maybe the parking attendants despaired of owning the cars they parked (though many of the Regatta venders were apparently aristocrats in disguise, keeping up old traditions of waiting on their peers for fun). Even among the upper crust who’d passed the Steward’s Gate (through which—while not as narrow as the proverbial eye of the needle—the well-heeled camels had entered), conceivably there were a few of shaky fortune. Theo overheard one elaborately frocked young woman fret to her friend, as they slopped daintily along the walkway, that if mud splashed her dress she was ruined, since she planned to return it to the shop in the morning and get her money back. Still—at least to Theo’s eye—almost everybody at Henley looked rich as a lord, and in fact quite a lot of them were exactly that.