Jonas said, “It’s too late for second thoughts, or third, or fifth, or last.” He spoke from the floor of the King William bedroom where he was doing sit-ups, his toes braced under a bureau. “Foolscap is no longer ours to disclaim, or—” he swiveled, hands behind his head, and looked at Theo “—or to claim. Right, Mole?”
Mole glanced over from the bed, where he lay in plaid bathrobe and slippers, biting his nails. “Umhm,” he said.
“Well, I say we stop here. I for one feel like a real bastard.” Theo held up the neat folders Jonas Marsh had organized for the approaching Cavendish London program. “We’re teachers, we’re scholars, Jonas! How can we pretend any good can come of forgery?”
“Any good?” Jonas grunted through two more sit-ups then crawled to his feet, tenderly rubbing his stomach. “To the Romans who forged the memoirs of Dares, that fabricated Trojan soldier, and Dictys, that equally suspicious combatant on the Greek side, we owe, don’t we, the story of Troilus and Cressida? Is that not good? To Carlo Sigonio, who in 1582 forged the Consolatio of Cicero, we owe all the consolation it provided during the two hundred years before it was discovered to be a fake. That’s good. The medieval poems poor bonkers Chatterton forged are good medieval poems.” He swung his arms from side to side. “I could go on.”
“Please don’t,” called Mole. “They were all found out.”
“Your play,” said Jonas, “is a very good play. No matter who or how many wrote it, or when they happened to do so. All that is simply how scholars earn a living—by pissing out territory and then bickering over it.”
Mole sighed, chewing on a cuticle. “Well, I say I’m glad we’re doing it, if for no other reason than the Reverend Brakeshaw’s condescension to Dame Winifred. It’s awf’lly infuriating. We’ll show him up properly!”
“There is that,” Theo admitted.
Jonas said, “Ryan, we’ve gone too far to stop. You agreed that once I undertook this, no more questions. Didn’t you make that pledge? Didn’t you? Yes, you did. Well, we’re going ahead. I’m going ahead, and you two sentimental cowardly lions are coming with me.” He glowered at them until they lowered their eyes, then returned to his exercises.
“Theo,” Mole said sweetly, “no sense in us fussing. With the construction going on, we couldn’t get Foolscap out of there now if we tried.”
“Ridiculous to think of it!” Jonas curled up like a hedgehog, and began rolling back and forth on his back.
“And I’d like her to have this last triumph,” Mole went on. “After the way they’ve all written her off.”
Jonas spluttered, “Now, be honest, Mole! You want the triumph of tricking your old teacher!”
“That’s not fair!” The small man sat up, brushing the black bangs from his forehead. “Oh, I do suppose I would like her to see I did have more, don’t you know, imagination, and, all right, daring, than she suspected.”
Theo picked up one of Dame Winifred’s books, Puritanism and the Early Modern Theatre, from Mole’s stack of research materials. “I think he wants Miss Throckmorton to triumph too, Jonas. And it’s true; look how the search has invigorated her.”
“Hasn’t it!” Mole knelt up on the bed, exclaiming, “‘How dull it is to pause, to make an end, / To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!’”
“Mole!” Jonas Marsh warned.
“‘Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will / To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.’”
“My god,” shouted Jonas, running to clap his hand over Mole’s mouth. “He’s started on the Victorians! Worse, worse than Bleats and Jelly.”
Mole removed the hand and said, “It’s Fortune’s call, Theo. Either Dame Winifred believes it’s real, or she doesn’t. Either they find the manuscript or they don’t.” And settling into his pillow, he picked up his anthology of British poetry. “Tennyson, anyone?”
“I still feel like a bastard,” Theo sighed. “All right. Here’s the deal. If it looks as if she’s going to make a public statement that could embarrass her later, then we tell her privately. All right?”
Jonas kicked at the bed leg. “She’d be the first to admit that if she does get fooled, she deserved to get fooled.”
“That’s the deal, Jonas.”
Jonas raised his eyebrows, growled, shook his head, yanked at his hair, and nodded.
Chapter 31
General Alarum
For the love of the lie itself.
—Sir Francis Bacon
The construction workers found the manuscript two weeks later. It was far from the first of their finds. Saint Michael’s had been left structurally unrestored for so long that at almost every blow of the sledgehammer, every prise of the claw, there tumbled out, if not old treasure, at least antiquated trash. Among a dump heap of other debris, the crew unearthed an embroidered hawking glove, a pewter candlestick, an eighteenth-century sheep clipper, a rotted cope with gold threads, and a black biretta green with mold. They came across assorted bones (some of them human), and assorted bits of iron, glass, and crockery (most of it not as old as everyone hoped). Behind the great drawers of an armoire for clerical vestments, they found a 1702 edition of Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler, lost there perhaps by some fishing enthusiast of a minister who’d rushed from his favorite bank of the Urswick just in time to throw down rod and creel, and fling on chasuble, alb, and stole.
Used as a leveler in the bracing legs of the pulpit steps, they found two high Anglican tomes: A Safeway to Salvation by William Chillingworth, chaplain to the Royalist Army, and a 1627 collection of seven sermons on the divine rights of kings by John Cosins, rector of Brancepeth. The symbology of the use to which these particular books had been put greatly amused Dame Winifred, for reasons Mr. Brakeshaw could not fathom (even when she gave him a hint: “Royalists used as levelers for a Puritan pulpit, ho ho?”), and which he therefore dismissed as further hysteria.
To the great happiness of its rector, Saint Michael’s proved to have hoarded symbols more transparently valuable than irony. Secreted under the stones of the sacristy was a small cache of high sacramental implements, vessels for the host and holy oil, including a gold ampulla, a eucharistic pyx, and a scribonium with sapphires in it. Even though before anyone else saw it, one of the masons had pocketed a little monstrance (either because it contained somebody’s sanctified finger bone or because it was solid silver and sprinkled with pearls), the three remaining antiques sent Mr. Brakeshaw into a delirium. Like a gambling addict on a roll in Reno, he now expected King Tut’s tomb every day; he looked for tax chests packed with Spanish gold in the bell tower, and the Holy Grail under a pew. Workers complained that they could scarcely tug on a crowbar without tripping over the old parson; he shoved his head into any cavity they created before they could even pull out their hammers, and the crowds he was inviting in to watch their work made it impossible for them to do any.
After the visiting bishop was beaned by a piece of falling plaster and the Earl of Newbolt fell in a hole where he’d expected the altar steps, the contractor (raising the specter of million-pound lawsuits) convinced the rector to ban these guest parties, but only a lack of more ready cash (and the Countess of Newbolt’s reluctance to supply it) kept Mr. Brakeshaw from telling the crew to dismantle the entire church stone by numbered stone and look for another Sutton Hoo underneath.
Brakeshaw was not cooled even by any embarrassment he’d felt at having erroneously told the local paper that the hidden altar objects were Jacobean Anglican, buried under the sacristy just before the Civil War. When corrected by Dame Winifred in front of a pimply teenaged reporter (the objects were early Tudor Catholic, secreted when Henry VIII had snatched the nearby convent from its Dawbney abbess), Brakeshaw was entirely unshaken, and said, “These are matters for men who are experts in these matters. It remains a question of some debate.”
It was not until September 29 that the little
Tudor chest, its lid a carving of Saint Michael standing with his foot on a dead dragon’s head, was discovered when the west choir stall was temporarily removed. Inside this chest were two 1604 prayer books, an Elizabethan shilling, and a bound folio containing a manuscript of a play called Foolscap. That the discovery was made on the church’s own name day, Michaelmas, the Feast of Saint Michael and All the Angels, struck some as a miracle and others as just a coincidence. That the organist was practicing (or trying to, with half the organ draped in drop cloths) a Magnificat by another Elizabethan, William Byrd (who’d undoubtedly even met Raleigh), struck at least the organist as proof that he was deeply attuned to great spiritual forces from the past. That the psalm for the day was 139, Domine probasti, “Oh Lord thou hast searched me out and known me. Thou knowst my down-sitting and my up-rising; thou understandest my thoughts long before,” caused Theo Ryan to break out into a sweat when he saw it on the morning service program (where Dame Winifred Throckmorton had jotted the exact time and date on which she’d opened the vellum commonplace book).
Summoned by her telephone call, Theo had rushed back to Devon as soon as Mole and he had tracked down Jonas and as soon as Jonas finished flogging twenty-five Cavendish undergraduates through the National Portrait Gallery (where the Armada portrait of Raleigh seemed to stare at Theo with cynical reproach). By the time the three arrived at Saint Michael’s on Urswick, so had the press.
At 9:45 that morning, the chest had been brought straight over by the contractor to Dame Winifred, who happened then to be at her prayers in the back of the nave, having just arrived at the church. By chance, Mr. Brakeshaw wasn’t there; after morning prayers, he (and a hired security guard) had taken the ampulla, pyx, and scribonium to London, and he wasn’t scheduled to return until evening. But the young contractor would have brought anything with books in it to Dame Winifred anyhow; he’d known her for years from Bourne House, and though she was in his opinion “loop-de-loop,” he liked her, and he didn’t like the rector. He’d liked her enough to be concerned by her behavior when she opened the thin bound folio. Her breath caught, color left her face. Carefully, but quickly, she turned the pages front to back, tilted them to the light, held the glass of her spectacles close to the ink.
She swayed slightly in the pew just once, then she sat there upright and entirely motionless, her eyes closed, not speaking, not responding to the contractor’s asking if she were all right, not moving in any way at all except that finally a spill of tears fell from the corner of her eye; one dropped into the dust on the book’s vellum cover.
The date of the discovery Dame Winifred was too skeptical to take as miraculous, but she did tell Theo that it felt like a wry sign from God (and from Raleigh, if God and Raleigh were on speaking terms) that on September 29, her hand should first open that folio, and first see the words, “Writ by Sr. Walt. R. in the Tower & preserv’d by Lady Ralegh his Wife after his martyrdom. Called by him Foolscap, A Short Comedie.” For Saint Michael’s name day had always been significant in Dame Winifred’s life; Michaelmas was the first day of term at Oxford where she’d spent so many decades, and Michaelmas was her birthday, her eightieth.
By evening, the little stone chapel by the river Urswick was fuller than it had been in many a sadly secular year. The (very few) parishioners who’d come by regular habit to pray and the few more who’d come because it was a Holy Feast Day were amazed to see what looked like a party going on in their house of worship. Even more amazed when he arrived in a taxi was the Reverend Steven Brakeshaw, whose heart at first almost went up in flames at the envious supposition that his part-time curate had drawn a crowd like this for an evensong prayer service. The photogenic Earl and Countess of Newbolt, both in lovely cashmere suits, were there with their four children (including Willie Stanlow, the earl-to-be, who filmed the whole scene with his camcorder). The Marquess of Dawbney (in torn pullover, stained corduroys, and enormous wellingtons) was there with his three springer spaniels tied to a tree outside. The construction crew was there, lounging by the riverbank, eating Big Macs from the new McDonald’s in the next town. The rector spotted Dame Winifred Throckmorton there with the big American and his peculiar friends. They were chatting with the London Times. And the BBC.
When the rector found out why they were all there, he quickly scooted to the vestry, changed into his newest surplice, did the best he could to cover his scalp with the few strands of hair left to him, and returned to be interviewed. In slow sonorous tones, he told the BBC that it was he who’d first put Dame Winifred Throckmorton onto the possibility of there having been a Raleigh manuscript hidden somewhere on the premises of Saint Michael’s; he then launched into a garbled anecdote in which Raleigh’s “heretical wife Carew” and “Catholic terrorists” figured prominently. Dame Winifred’s exasperated sideline snorts at this historical mishmash the rector took to be hyperventilation from emotional upheaval, and he instructed the old scholar to sit down and put her head between her legs.
Asked by the BBC whether he believed the manuscript to be a genuine Raleigh play, Mr. Brakeshaw (who hadn’t clapped eyes on it) said he hadn’t a doubt in the world.
Dame Winifred was not nearly as forthcoming about the play’s authenticity. “It’s certainly not in Raleigh’s hand,” she said. “It looks like a secretarial transcription in the style of 1620 or ’30. It is possible it is a copy of a Raleigh original, one which the family (or others) had made for themselves sometime after Raleigh’s death. But, of course, I couldn’t possibly say without further study.” She went on to explain why and how she’d spent a decade looking for such a play, and why and how this might, or might not, be it. She paused, squinting into the lights. “I’m sorry, young man? I’m afraid I don’t quite follow your, your hieroglyphics—”
The youthful BBC reporter was making all sorts of rapid gestures at Dame Winifred, telling her via these facial contortions and hand signals to face the camera, smile, speak louder, speak faster, lower her voice, hold up the book, come to a conclusion. Willie Stanlow filmed the BBC filming her, and did a close-up of her shaking her finger at their camera, piping, “Young man, stand still! You’re muddling me with all your whirring about.”
The BBC decided to leave these remarks in the segment they aired; it sounded so quintessentially like what they’d decided to say she was: “A legendary Oxford figure, a scholar from the old golden days of textual criticism, famous for her brilliance, and cherished by generations of Oxonians for her high spirits and unconventionality.”
To Reverend Brakeshaw’s chagrin, the news showed a nice shot of Saint Michael’s, but gave not a single second’s worth of his own interview; instead, there was a clip of a former student of Dame Winifred’s, now an illustrious gray-haired Renaissance professor at Cambridge. He said that if Dame Winifred were to tell him Ralph Roister Doister was by Sir Walter Raleigh, he wasn’t sure but what he’d believe her. So if she said this Foolscap was Raleigh’s, by God it was Raleigh’s.
But that was exactly what she wasn’t saying, at least not yet. Dame Winifred told the press that she wouldn’t say it wasn’t by Raleigh, but neither could she commit herself beyond doubt to say that it was. Theo never took his eyes from her face, but though an excellent reader, he couldn’t interpret her expression.
“Dear Freddie! Good for you!” cooed the svelte, blond Andie Stanlow, Countess of Newbolt, as she bent to kiss the old scholar’s cheek.
“Dear, dear Freddie! Very good for you” crooned the svelte, ruddy Horry Stanlow, Earl of Newbolt, as he bowed to kiss the old scholar’s hand, and to remove from it the vellum folio. He walked out of Saint Michael’s with the manuscript under his arm, and did it with such an assumption of baronial privilege that no one stopped him. The Marquess of Urswick would have tried, but he’d had the congenital bad luck to be outside trying to breakup a fight between his three spaniels and the rector’s bulldog while Stanlow was in the church. Dame Winifred even went home to Bourne with the Stanlows so th
ey could lock Foolscap in his temperature-controlled library safe. It was hard, Jonas Marsh later noted, to say who was made more apoplectic by the news that Newbolt had commandeered the great literary find—Brakeshaw or the Marquess of Urswick. Both of them helplessly tangled in the moil of leashed dogs, they shouted repeatedly that the earl should be stopped and brought back. (“And shot!” the marquess added. “Bloody Stanlows!”) No one obeyed them.
While Dame Winifred appeared reluctant to make up her mind about the authorship of Foolscap, other interested parties were less so. Over the next week, while Theo, Jonas, and Mole waited fretfully by their London phones, photostats of the play were made, and then the thin folio volume was subjected to a battery of tests by a battery of impartial experts brought to Bourne House for that purpose. As far as technical criteria went, the text passed (or as Theo said, Mole and Jonas passed) with a resounding cry of “genuinely Jacobean.” But which Jacobean? The great Raleigh or not? Far more than they had anticipated, the fact that Dame Winifred Throckmorton thought it might be by Raleigh was enough to set off other scholars one way or the other. The debate began the day the discovery made the front page of the Times—on both sides of the Atlantic. In the months to come, when copies of Foolscap began circulating, the grove of academe blazed with a heated controversy whose flame would burn for years.
Absolutement oui, said one eminent expert from France. “No way,” said another from California. “Unmistakably Raleigh,” affirmed a committee of six officers of an international Renaissance society. Five members immediately resigned in protest. “Not a very good play, but it is Raleigh’s,” claimed the illustrious gray-haired Renaissance professor at Cambridge; “Brilliant, but it is not Raleigh’s,” rebutted an equally illustrious gray-haired professor at Oxford. A scholar in Scotland was convinced that Foolscap was a forgery from the Commonwealth period, possibly by William Davenant, designed to enhance the reputation of Raleigh as an ur-antimonarchist revolutionary. “Idiotic,” said his colleagues.
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