The Bookman's Tale

by Charlie Lovett

  In front of him lay a slim volume bound in worn, dark brown leather with no markings on the cover. Next to it lay a pair of white cotton gloves. After a few minutes of waiting in a silence not punctuated even by the ticking of a clock, Peter decided this must be a test. He pulled on the gloves and carefully opened the book. The pages within were worn at the edges and looked as soft as flannel. Peter turned to the title page and read: The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet Prince of Denmarke. At the bottom of the page was the publication date: 1603. Shakespeare had still been alive, Peter thought, and for the second time that day, the simple combination of ink and paper literally took his breath away. He felt thrilled, awed, privileged. How many people ever had the chance to hold a copy of Hamlet printed when Shakespeare was still alive? Fingers trembling he turned to the first page of text.

  He had read Hamlet in high school and again in freshman English, but this text was different. He had turned the page and read almost to the arrival of the ghost when he heard a soft voice behind him.

  “Interesting reading?”

  “It’s not quite the way I remember it,” said Peter, gently closing the book and laying it reverently on the table. He turned to see a short man with curly gray hair and horn-rimmed glasses. He wore not the tweed jacket that Peter had expected, but a pair of blue jeans and a red polo shirt.

  “It’s called a bad quarto,” said the man. “It’s the first printing of Hamlet, but the text is inferior to later editions. Some scholars think it was plagiarized from memory by someone who saw a performance.”

  “Still, it’s the first printing of Hamlet,” said Peter.

  “Yes, quite a find,” said the man.

  “I didn’t mean to touch it, it’s just . . .”

  “Quite all right,” said the man. “There is no point in having these things if we don’t ever have the pleasure of looking at them. What do you think of it?”

  “It’s . . . it’s . . .” Peter struggled to find the words to describe the experience of holding that book, turning those pages, reading those words printed while the author still lived and breathed and walked the streets of London. Until recently books had been only something to hide behind, then he had begun to see them as carefully crafted objects, but this was completely different. This was a revelation. This book was filled with history and mystery. Just being near it made Peter flush with emotion. “It’s amazing,” he said at last. He placed one cotton-gloved hand lightly on the book. He could almost feel its life pouring into his fingertips. “I mean, the person who first owned this book, who first read these pages, might have seen the original production of Hamlet. He might have even known Shakespeare personally.”

  “It’s our latest acquisition,” said the man. “A newly discovered copy. Miss Devereaux would have been thrilled.”

  “Did you know her?” asked Peter, nodding toward Amanda Devereaux’s portrait.

  “Only briefly,” said the man. “She was already quite ill when her husband hired me to oversee Special Collections here at Ridgefield. I’m Francis Leland.” He held out his hand and Peter shook it.

  “Peter Byerly,” he said. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, sir.”

  “Two things you should know about life here in Special Collections, Peter. The first is you are welcome to handle anything, as long as you handle it properly. The second is that I am not called sir, I’m called Francis.”

  “Okay. Thank you . . . uhm . . . Francis,” said Peter, feeling awkward at the sudden familiarity. He turned his eyes away from the librarian and back to the book on the table. “So how could something as old as the first edition of Hamlet be newly discovered?” he asked.

  “People are finding lost books all the time,” said Francis. “Scholars didn’t even know the bad quarto existed until eighteen twenty-three. We thought there were only two copies until this one turned up in a theological library in Switzerland. No one had taken it off the shelf in a couple of centuries, so no one knew it was there. We bought it privately last month.”

  “That must be something to discover a book that nobody’s ever heard of or that everybody thought was lost.”

  “It’s every bibliophile’s dream,” said Francis, and Peter knew in a second that it was his own. He could imagine nothing more glorious than finding some lost literary treasure—the manuscript of some unknown Shakespearean play or perhaps an edition of Hamlet earlier than the one he had just held—and preserving it for the world. Even the remote possibility that such a thing could happen brought a surge of adrenaline to Peter’s veins.

  “Now,” said Francis, “how soon can you extricate yourself from circulation and begin work here?”

  “You mean I got the job?” asked Peter.

  Francis pulled a pair of white cotton gloves from his pocket and slipped them on as he spoke. “Peter, you either are or you are not a rare bookman. I can’t change that. You felt the power of this.” He picked up the Hamlet quarto. “Most students just see an old book, but you felt its deeper significance. You don’t choose this career; it chooses you. Now, I can help you and I can teach you, but know this—after today you will never look at books the same way again. Nothing I do or don’t do will change that.”

  Peter sat quietly for a moment gazing at case after case filled with books and considering the fact that each of those books might provide him with the sort of emotional jolt he had received from the Hamlet. He felt like an addict who has just discovered an endless supply of the perfect drug. Francis slipped the Hamlet onto a shelf in a case surmounted by a bust of Cleopatra.

  “All the Elizabethan imprints are here in the Cleopatra case,” he said. “It was Miss Devereaux’s favorite part of the collection. This is her First Folio.” He indicated a tall, thick volume lying on its side on the top shelf of the case. You’ll enjoy it, I think.”

  “Why are there busts on all the cases?” asked Peter.

  “Ah, you noticed that, did you,” said Francis, smiling. “A tribute by Miss Devereaux to her most admired collector. You see, Miss Devereaux also dreamed of finding an unknown treasure, and she had great respect for those collectors who had saved a piece of culture for future generations. Did you know, Peter, that it was because of a book collector that you were able to read Beowulf in your freshman English class? One man saved the only known manuscript of the first great English poem. And he saved a lot more than that. Gawain and the Green Knight, the Lindisfarne Gospels, some of the greatest treasures of the book world. His library in London was divided into fourteen bookcases, each with the bust of a Roman emperor or imperial lady above. Miss Devereaux asked me to organize this room the same way.”

  “Who was this collector?” asked Peter.

  “He was one of those who, as you say, might have known Shakespeare personally. His name was Robert Cotton.”

  Southwark, London, 1592

  Bartholomew Harbottle strode down Borough High Street, burst through the door of the George and Dragon, and shook the dust of the highway off his new doublet. From the back bar he could hear the familiar sounds of carousing—and it had barely gone four o’clock. He stomped across the floorboards, threw open a door, and revealed himself to his friends.

  “Barty!” cried Lyly. “We thought you were in Winchester.”

  “And I thought you were sober,” said Bartholomew, taking both a seat at the table and a mug of ale proffered by Peele.

  “There’s no point in staying so,” said Peele. “There’s no work.”

  “But it’s the high season,” said Bartholomew, “I should think the theaters would be filled every day in such weather.”

  “He hasn’t heard,” said Lyly. “The theaters have been closed these two months. First a riot and now the plague.”

  “I could do without the plague,” said Bartholomew. “But I’m sorry to have missed the riot. And what of you, Lyly? Not Master of the Queen’s Revels yet?”

  “Edmond Tylney absolute
ly refuses to die. I shall petition the queen again in the spring. Perhaps fifteen ninty-three will be my lucky year.”

  “Well, tell her that riots are good for business, will you,” said Peele with a booming laugh.

  “But who’s this I see returning from the bar laden like a packhorse?” said Bartholomew. “Can that be the face of Christopher Marlowe behind all those mugs?”

  “None other,” said Marlowe, sloshing ale onto Bartholomew as he set the next round on the table.

  “I’m surprised to find you here, with the plague in town.”

  “My visit will be brief, I assure you,” said Marlowe.

  “If it were me,” said Peele, “it would be just long enough for a good drink and a better whore.”

  “It wouldn’t be long at all then,” said Bartholomew, “for yours is never long for long.” The table erupted in laughter and Bartholomew took a long draught of ale and looked around at the sparkling faces of the educated wits, the very sort of men he had hoped to have as friends when he entered the book business only three years ago. And now here he was, welcomed into the bosom of London’s finest—urbane and talented, they made up perhaps the greatest collection of writers who ever drank together.

  There was Thomas Nashe sitting quietly in the corner. Bartholomew had sold hundreds of copies of Nashe’s pamphlets at his bookshop in Paternoster Row. Then there was George Peele, whose Arraignment of Paris had been presented before the queen. Peele’s wild antics dated back to his days at Oxford, and he could drink, gamble, and whore as heavily as Bartholomew himself, and that was saying something. Patient John Lyly was as fine a writer as any of them, Bartholomew thought, excepting of course Kit Marlowe. For Marlowe there was no match.

  That he, Bartholomew Harbottle, who had been born and raised in a village void of literacy, could be sitting here, at the age of twenty-six, drinking and laughing with the greatest playwright of the age seemed unfathomable. But then Bartholomew always had a talent for improving his lot, first attaching himself to the household of one of the local gentry, then forcing that gentleman to recognize his intellect and send him off to Cambridge, and finally making his way to London where his success in the book business had brought him to such lofty literary circles. He had won money off Marlowe cheating at cards. He had even won whores off Marlowe cheating at cards. He, whose long-forgotten family scraped out a living on a scrap of farmland, had cheerfully romped with bawds paid for by the greatest English writer who ever lived.

  “So all the poets are out of work,” said Bartholomew. “Even the glove-maker’s son?”

  “Will Shakespeare?” said Peele. “Not out of work exactly. That is, he’s not writing plays.”

  “What is he writing?” asked Bartholomew, knowing that bashing the upstart Shakespeare, who had come not from Oxford or Cambridge but from a grammar school in someplace called Stratford, was a favorite pastime of the wits.

  Peele looked around the table, waiting until every eye was on him before delivering his punch line. “The glove-maker’s son is writing sonnets!” A wave of laughter swept the room. “Sonnets, can you imagine. See how many of those you can sell, Barty.”

  “But you must tell us of Winchester,” said Lyly. “I judge by the fineness of your new doublet that your trip was not without its rewards.”

  “Gentlemen,” said Bartholomew, leaning back in his seat. “I have today made more money as a bookseller than in all the past twelve months. I have made enough that not only shall I buy the next round of ale while I tell you the tale, but for anyone who wishes to adjourn upstairs afterward, I shall buy a round of fleshly entertainment as well.” He soaked in the cheers of his friends, blew the froth off another mug of ale, and began his story.

  He told of how he had met Robert Cotton, a young collector of books and manuscripts, at a meeting of the Elizabethan Society of Antiquaries. Barely a week later he had been drinking with a canon from Winchester when the reverend let slip a local legend that sent Bartholomew packing for Hampshire.

  “It took me nearly two months to lay my plan, but one can’t rush these sorts of things. I needed, after all, a brawny imbecile and a senile verger and they both needed an affection for drink. The verger proved an easy matter. I had only to drink a few nights in the taverns near the cathedral. The imbecile was more of a challenge. I finally found a farmhand who fit my requirements perfectly. He wasn’t too trusting at first, but after a week or two of my paying for his ale every night, and a couple of visits to a brothel, he was ready to follow me anywhere. I chose a Tuesday night when everything in the precincts was quiet.” Bartholomew took two greedy gulps of ale and continued.

  “As you know, my family is from Wickham.”

  “They’re from no such place,” said Peele.

  “Yes, but that’s hardly common knowledge in Winchester. When I knocked on the door of my old verger, whom I had gotten good and drunk earlier in the evening, I was a poor pilgrim from Wickham come to pray for my father’s health at the tomb of our town’s most famous bishop.”

  “William of Wykeham,” said Lyly.

  “None other. You see, according to the canon I entertained here in this very inn, a little-known legend in Winchester holds that Wykeham was buried with an ancient book in his arms.”

  “The sort of book that might appeal to young Robert Cotton?” asked Nashe.

  “Exactly,” said Bartholomew, smiling. “The verger didn’t seem concerned that, despite the warmth of the summer night, both my ‘brother’ and myself were clad in heavy cloaks. He let us in the south transept and tottered back to his lodgings.”

  “And under the cloaks?” asked Marlowe.

  “Well, I had prayed to Bishop William before, you see. I’d spent long afternoons in his chantry chapel sizing up his tomb, measuring every dimension. It took some time to find a good carpenter who could be trusted, but eventually I found one who made me something resembling the trestle of a large table. It was in parts so the imbecile and I could assemble it next to the bishop’s tomb. Then it took all our combined strengths, along with a couple of iron bars, to prize the bishop’s effigy and its marble slab from the top of the tomb and slide it onto the wooden support.”

  “And what did you find?” said Lyly.

  “Dust, the smell of a few centuries of decay, and the good bishop. It was unnerving the way he stared up at me with those empty eye sockets, and I swear I heard moaning echoing through the cathedral when I first looked on him.”

  “The wind?” said Peele.

  “That’s what I told myself,” said Harbottle.

  “And what about the book?” said Marlowe.

  “Clasped in his hands right where it had been for nearly two hundred years. It took me a minute to prize it loose, and I’m afraid I broke a few of the episcopal fingers in the process, but when I had it free and blew the dust off, well . . . it was as beautiful an illuminated Psalter as you could ever hope to see. Eleventh century, I’d say, maybe even earlier. Once I had that in my bag, it was just a matter of pushing the top back on the tomb, slipping out of the cathedral, and giving my companion enough to drink that he’d remember nothing in the morning.”

  “And what did this Robert Cotton think of your find?” asked Peele.

  “He had only two things to say,” said Bartholomew. “That he didn’t want to know where it came from, and would twenty pounds be sufficient.”

  “Twenty pounds!” cried Peele, sputtering ale all over the table. “For one book?”

  “Twenty pounds should keep us all in ale until the plague is long gone,” said Marlowe, pounding his empty mug on the table. “What say you buy us another round and we drink a toast to the late bishop of Winchester.”

  When the next round was served, Bartholomew, blushing with the triumph of his story and with his third mug of ale, turned to the great playwright.

  “Now, Marlowe,” he said. “You’ve not yet told me what b
rings you to London when the plague is abroad.”

  “I came to bid farewell to our dear friend Robert Greene,” said Marlowe.

  “Greene? Why, where’s he going?”

  “As good a question as any,” said Lyly. “For he lies this day on his deathbed.”

  Bartholomew set down his mug and felt the blood drain from his face. Among them all, there had been no better drinker, no better whorer, none more prone to lose half a crown in a card game and laugh at the loss while pissing into the Thames than the poet Robert Greene. Bartholomew had the unusual good fortune never to have lost a close friend, and despite his lifestyle he was capable of affection. That Greene should be no longer there for a friendly night of debauchery hit him harder than he would have expected.

  “Plague?” he whispered.

  “Hard living,” said Marlowe. “He reckons it was a dinner of pickled herring that did him in, but I think we all know it took more than one dinner to push Robert Greene to the edge of this world.”

  “Where is he?” asked Bartholomew.

  “Lodging with a shoemaker in Dowgate,” said Marlowe. “A Mr. Isam. The wife looks after him. Seems a bit smitten, I’d say. Greene hasn’t a halfpenny to his name to repay her.”

  “I should like to see him,” said Bartholomew.

  “You’re not the only one,” said Peele, laughing. “Emma Ball was here not an hour ago looking for him.”

  “His mistress?” asked Bartholomew.

  “More than that, to judge by the crying bundle in her arms,” said Peele.