Foolscap

by Michael Malone

  Dame Winifred flung her feet off the hassock, stood, and shook her glasses at the small dark man perched on a stool by her hearth. “Archibald, your work was always diligent, thorough, and reasonably accurate. But a bit, as I recall, cautious. A little…obvious, is that fair?” She rapped her spectacles on his shoulder. “Facts are cattle. Theory is a bird.” Her bent fingers fluttered skyward. “One must leap, in order to soar.”

  “yes!” said Jonas Marsh, biting sharply into the rock-hard cookie and instantly regretting it.

  They made their plans over mixed grills at the Nightingale (Miss Throckmorton declined to eat the chops at the King William, where the three men were staying. Jonas had rejected the Nightingale’s accommodations; he preferred Georgian coaching inns to the “daub and wattle, stoop and shiver paddocks” of earlier hostelries). It was decided to split up: Ryan and Throckmorton would take Saint Michael’s church. Marsh and Fontwell would take Urswick Castle. Mole shared with Gordon Dawbney, Marquess of Urswick, membership in the Garrick Club, which should help. Besides, Dame Winifred confessed that the irascible marquess had “turned her out of the house” after learning of her prior friendship with the ninth earl of Newbolt, and after hearing from an eavesdropping butler that she had made “unfavorable remarks” about his library as compared to that of Horry Stanlow at Bourne House. “Quite right, too,” she said.

  “It seems pretty ungrateful after you’d pointed out those first editions for the marquess,” Theo said.

  “Theodore,” she said, hacking away at her pork, “there are those who simply cannot forgive a favor, and those who never forget one.”

  Theo kept his eyes guiltily fixed on his plate.

  And so, one golden autumn day after the next, Marsh and Fontwell drove the yellow Bentley under the dog-toothed gateway into Urswick Castle, where they’d been very graciously received by the marquess after telling him that Dame Winifred Throckmorton believed a play by Sir Walter Raleigh was lost somewhere at the house of his great rival, but that they believed it might be right here on Dawbney property. The marquess even offered to put them up while they searched, but as Jonas now had a cold, and as the guest rooms of the Norman castle were icy even in September, they declined with thanks.

  When he wasn’t overseeing the construction of his new “Frontierland” amusement park, Gordon Dawbney, a stocky, ginger-haired man of fifty and a passionate hunter, was busy, now that the summer tourist trade had thinned, trying to kill pheasants while not killing either straggling American toddlers or any of his expensive miniature deer. So he was unable to help personally with the search. But he instructed the staff to show his visitors every courtesy.

  For twelve days, the two men happily toured the towers and turrets of Urswick, pretending to search for the lost manuscript. They looked in the Duke’s Great Hall, the Earl’s Small Hall, the kitchens, and even the library, where Mole read a good Agatha Christie and Jonas found a nicely bound Wilkie Collins. They strolled stone corridors thick with racks of antlers, and in galleries, studied the portraits of Dawbneys who’d been stabbed by their lovers, expired of the plague, burned at the stake, and died in innumerable other unpleasant ways fighting on the losing side in fields across the land. They examined the cabinets containing the heretical version of the Bible one Dawbney had defiantly taken to the block, and the little model of Urswick Castle one had nostalgically whittled in the Tower. They felt the nicks on the long sword with which John of Bourne had attempted to rescue Richard II. They stared at the oak beam rafter from which a love-crazed Victorian Dawbney had hanged himself with a velvet drapery tassel.

  One afternoon, they climbed the round tower, tapped about for hidden recesses in the “Henry IV Apartments,” and had a picnic on the battlements. Another day, they peeked inside the crusader’s arrow chest in the armory passage (now the Dungeon of Medieval Torture Instruments). At trestle tables in the Tea Room, they wrote postcards they’d bought in the Souvenir Shoppe. They circled the moat in the paddle boats, enjoyed pleasant talks with the medieval minstrels, and sympathized with the weary staff who’d just heard that next summer they were all going to have to wear fourteenth-century costumes and act out the Peasants’ Revolt in front of D’Aubiney Keep.

  Every day they left early enough to visit all the antique shops in the area, where they found what Mole described to Theo as “terrifically nice little things,” and which certainly looked as if they might be. Ranging far and fast, they bought thick bolts of table lace in Honiton and great clumps of crockery in Lyme Regis. Then, every night over Nightingale chops, Marsh and Fontwell reported back to the other team their lack of success at the castle.

  In their searches, they said, they had discovered a number of objects the Marquess of Urswick hadn’t known he had—some of them (including a Norman two-handed battle-ax) quite valuable. They’d come across an Elizabethan printing press in the secret “priest-hole” behind the chimney of the Great Hall; they’d unearthed a well-thumbed Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and a mint-condition Essay on Miracles inscribed by Cardinal Newman himself. But they hadn’t found anything resembling a Raleigh manuscript, or for that matter, any book at all predating 1775 anywhere in the great pile of Urswick stone. Still, the two men cheerfully promised Dame Winifred to carry on, their faith in the existence of a Raleigh play undiminished.

  Theo spent his evenings either with them, or in his room working on the Rexford biography, or at the Stag & Hart listening to Rhodora’s songs on the jukebox. The young woman named Stephanie whom he’d met there never returned, and when Theo finally asked the bartender about her, he was told that she’d “patched up her break-off with her fiancé” (the source of her sorrow when Theo had met her), and moved into his flat in Ottery St. Mary. Theo said he was glad to hear it.

  His days he spent with Miss Throckmorton, and (as long as he didn’t think about the implications of the forgery) he enjoyed them greatly. Despite their disparity in age and background, they never seemed to run out of conversation. They shared the Renaissance, and that was ample and luxurious meeting ground.

  Each morning, it was a sight to see (and Mildred saw it from her spy post in The Heights) the drivers of the two teams—Miss Throckmorton in her Hillman Imp and Jonas Marsh in the yellow Bentley—as they revved their motors in the Barnet town center and shot off down the High, scattering pebbles and pedestrians. As the Bentley zoomed to Urswick Castle, the Imp bucketed past Bourne House and along the river road to Saint Michael’s Church. There, the rector, Mr. Steven Brakeshaw, was not nearly as receptive to the Theory as the Marquess of Urswick had proved. Mr. Brakeshaw had heard for years about Dame Winifred’s search for Raleigh relics, and placed no credence either in her ideas or her qualifications to pursue them. In fact, being quite ignorant of literary matters, he really didn’t much believe that Dame Winifred had made those earlier “famous discoveries” (as they were locally called) for which she’d (somehow) been dubbed a Dame Commander of the British Empire. The sinewy stooped old parson didn’t really much believe that any woman had ever done, or was capable of doing, anything whether famous or not, worthy of his attention.

  On Theo’s tenth daily visit to Saint Michael’s with Miss Throckmorton, the rector had taken him aside and whispered to him about “unmarried women of a certain age,” and whether it was wise to indulge them too far in their (he waggled his bushy eyebrows in Dame Winifred’s direction) “fancies.” Although Brakeshaw was himself an unmarried man of a certain age, he was a widower—with years of experience in not indulging female vagaries. He’d kept a tight guard on his wife’s fancies with great success, until she’d managed to escape him by dying of a rapid brain tumor a few years ago.

  “Balmy,” Brakeshaw confided to the young American. “Whole notion of this Raleigh business is balmy.” He pointed across the nave. “She’s been at it ever since she moved to Devon.”

  The retired scholar looked to be at it right now, or at least to be asking Mad Rob Dawbney about it,
for she was down on her knees in the west aisle, her hand holding her tam on, with her ear pressed close to that puritan earl’s brass marker.

  “Dame Winifred, really!” called the rector across the length of pews. “Dame Winifred!” (Though Low Church by birth, he was hopelessly Royalist by inclination and loved the sound of a title, even if somehow connected with a woman.) “You would do well to recall the words of Charles the first. ‘I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken?’”

  One may doubt whether King Charles would have found it amusing to discover on his tongue words actually spoken by Oliver Cromwell, his successor and executioner, but Miss Throckmorton certainly thought it worth a belly laugh. Brakeshaw, of course, attributed her guffaws not to his misquote but to her compulsive hysteria over “this Raleigh business.” With surreptitious head motions, he urged Theo to take notice. “Sad thing,” he sighed. “Not certain she shouldn’t see someone.” The rector ostentatiously straightened the rack of brochures (“A Short History of Saint Michael’s on Urswick” by Steven R. Brakeshaw, M.A., Rector) on sale for 35p each by the south door. He added, “If a great man like Raleigh had written a play, some man or other would have discovered the fact by now. And it wouldn’t be here in Saint Michael’s. It would be in some great library.”

  “Not necessarily,” said Theo, taking the hint and buying a brochure, plunking his coins into the slotted box. “Things go astray. And remember how long Raleigh was in prison, and how he died.”

  “Yes, yes,” Brakeshaw nodded importantly. “Elizabeth executed him over the Scottish succession business. He died an atheist, you know.”

  “Hmm.” Confronted with this thick wall of inaccuracies, Theo choked down the urge to point out that Raleigh had died a devout Christian, executed by James; he decided to bypass history and to stress random luck. “It’s quite possible to find very rare and valuable manuscripts where you least expect them. They found the Boswell papers in a croquet case. And think about it a minute.” Theo walked with the rector up the center aisle of the ancient chapel, into whose stone slates were inset mosaic Latin words for the Christian virtues, pausing on patientia. He said solemnly, “Miss Throckmorton, as you know, is a world-renowned Renaissance scholar.”

  Brakeshaw stopped in midstep (ironically, with his foot on sapientia) and mentally attempted to reject or suppress the idea of Dame Winifred’s being a world-renowned anything, even a deluded fanatic, when he himself was not renowned as far as the edge of the county—if last Sunday’s attendance at Saint Michael’s was any indication. “Retired schoolteachers get these fancies,” he stubbornly muttered.

  “But just suppose,” Theo urged. “Admittedly, it’s unlikely, but for a moment, just suppose that she’s not mistaken about this play. Suppose a great literary discovery should be made here; can you imagine what it would do for your church’s reputation?” Theo waved his arms around the dilapidated nave of little Saint Michael’s with such enthusiastic conjurations that the Reverend Brakeshaw suddenly saw the small space transformed into a vast cathedral with magnificent ribbed vaulting, soaring pillars of marbles, and rich alabaster fonts. He suddenly saw a steady stream of pilgrims flooding down the aisles, each paying at least 50p to view the Raleigh manuscript. He saw television interviews and his name on a brochure: “raleigh’s lost play” by Steven R. Brakeshaw, M.A., Rector of Saint Michael’s on Urswick.”

  These thoughts, as can happen with visions, began to turn the rector’s mind around. While he continued to give Miss Throckmorton and Theo only begrudging encouragement and denied them permission to search the premises except in his presence or to examine the old church records in any methodical way—still, conversion, fed by greed and jealousy, was growing like a weed inside him. He himself started, in the odd leisure moment, to look about, to poke a tentative broom under the confessional or shine a torch along the rafters of the crypt (terrifying a few rats and himself). And whenever he saw Dame Winifred pausing somewhere to scribble notes, he’d rush to the spot as soon as she left it and try to imagine what those notes might have said. Brakeshaw also instructed the young, affluent contractor in charge of the upcoming restoration to keep an eye out for “well, anything” he should come across. “Like old church property, odds and ends. Old books, that sort of item.”

  The contractor, who was always in a hurry, gave a quick, ruthless look around the crumbling church. “Listen here,” he growled. “Miss Throckmorton’s been narking at me seven years about old books and like, ever since I started with the earl’s renovations at Bourne House, so I don’t need telling to keep a lookout for her.”

  “For her? Ah ha,” said Brakeshaw with a tap to his beaked nose. “Should by some fluke anything antique-ish come to light in Saint Michael’s, of course you will bring it to me.” The last word was significantly stressed by the rector’s repeated rapping on his chest, as if he’d lapsed into the Catholic practice of mea culpas.

  “Right-cher-are, Rev,” muttered this disrespectful youth, who then zipped off in his Alfa-Romeo to give a neighboring town an estimate on what he would charge to save their medieval Guild Hall before it was too late.

  The day after the major work of restoration began at Saint Michael’s, Messieurs Fontwell, Ryan, and Marsh bid a temporary farewell to Dame Winifred. They had decided it would be better if they weren’t in the vicinity of Barnet-on-Urswick when what they called “the discovery” occurred. But the reasons they gave for their leaving happened also to be true: Theo had to work on the Rexford biography. Mole had to give one of his sisters away in marriage. Jonas had to return to London to begin orientation for the Cavendish Year Abroad students. “God help me,” he groaned to Dame Winifred during their final supper at the Nightingale, “as into my cultural care come a dozen shrewd and simpering southern belles and a dozen lobotomized libidinous young studs with thick shaved necks and bright pink feet each the size of a half-grown pig.”

  “He loves teaching,” Mole said.

  “Thought so.” Miss Throckmorton nodded.

  Mole called on the waiter for another bottle of wine. “Dame Winifred, we’ll keep on. In a month or so, we’ll come back and tackle Buh, Buh, Bourne House with you.”

  Jonas said, “Perhaps we should look into inventories of dowry articles that left Bourne when daughters married out. Or perhaps—”

  “Dear me, dear me,” the elderly woman muttered, as she sawed wildly at her meat. “Sometimes suspect I’ve led you kind gentlemen off on a dreadful fool’s journey. Chimera, whole thing. Wild goose.”

  “Ma’am,” said Jonas, kicking under the table the lamb chop that had flown off her plate. “Ma’am, remember the Lost Colony. If Raleigh could lose that, he could lose a play. And what’s been lost can be found.”

  “Ah, if only that were true, my dear Mr. Marsh,” she replied, hewing through her remaining chop. “As you’ll recall, there were five hundred thousand manuscripts in the great library of Alexandria. They were all burnt to soot.” The old woman noisily sighed, as if that loss, sixteen centuries old, was still raw and shocking to her. “We know,” she resumed, swatting bread crumbs from her vest, “the titles of more than one hundred and ten plays by Sophocles, and have only—” she turned quickly “—how many left to us, Archibald?”

  Mole glanced with wild consternation at Jonas and Theo, neither of whom could, or would, help him. “Puh, puh, plays of Sophocles? I think…seven?” he stammered hopefully.

  “Exactly, only seven. And only seven by Aeschylus. And many, many as doubtlessly marvelous as those, Mr. Marsh, gone forever. I should myself love to see far more of the editorial insights of Aristophanes of Byzantium than I know I shall.” The homely old woman put down her fork and knife quietly. “For Time is a very careless custodian of our little human history…” And with a sad grimace, she opened her hand, letting the image of irrevocable loss fall through her withered fingers like sand.

  “Bu, bu, but Raleigh’s not
an ancient Greek,” said Mole Fontwell with warmth. “And, my word, you’ve made great Renaissance discoveries before.”

  Theo said, “And will again, sooner or later.”

  “Sooner, then.” Dame Winifred smiled. “Later, I trust I shall be making far more…wonderful discoveries.” She tapped the general vicinity of her high stomach, causing, back at the King William Inn that night, a great deal of agitated discussion among the three men as to whether her gesture, following such an ominously mysterious remark, referred to some terminal cancer or fatal heart condition, or, on the other hand, had simply resulted from indigestion after so much fatty grilled meat.

  Further agitation followed. The moral unease that had festered in Theo for weeks burst forth, and he confessed to “having second thoughts” about playing this kind of a hoax on Miss Throckmorton at all.

  He was, he told his friends, unable to go through with it. Each day, when the two of them had arrived at Saint Michael’s, she’d knelt quietly in a back pew for five minutes or so, her tam bent down to the rail of the pew’s back, her glasses slipped onto the edge of her praying hands, her old face squeezed with thoughtful struggle. And this sight had troubled Theo deeply. She’d told him once, as he helped her to her feet, that he shouldn’t suppose she was praying to find the manuscript (which was just what he’d supposed). Rather, she was praying to be freed from the burden of wanting to find the manuscript in order to justify herself. “Regrettably,” she confessed, “one does not retire as easily from ambition, envy, pride, and vengefulness, as one does from Oxford, where those emotions are so richly nurtured.”

  The elderly woman’s words upset Theo more and more, and led finally to his outburst to Jonas and Mole about his “second thoughts.” He felt, he said, that any good they might do by making Dame Winifred (and her detractors) believe she’d found a Raleigh play was not worth the risk of her pain (not to mention her contempt for them) if she saw through the forgery. Theo’s collaborators strongly disagreed, and a long fight ensued.