The week of exams the library was open all night, but Special Collections still closed at five. Peter unlocked the door and disabled the alarm system before ushering Amanda into the narrow corridor that opened into the Devereaux Room, now lit only by the green glow of the EXIT sign. He turned on a reading lamp on the massive library table and pulled out a chair for Amanda. Then he disappeared for a moment into the dimness and returned with the oversized volume, bound in white leather with delicate blind stamping. From a box on the table he pulled two pairs of white cotton gloves, then he sat by Amanda and opened the book.
It was hard to believe it had been printed less than a hundred years ago. The thick paper; the exquisite foliage design wrapping around the text; the illustrations, so reminiscent of illuminated manuscripts; even the ancient typeface all spoke of a fifteenth-century volume, and of course that was exactly what Morris had intended. The pages were heavy between Peter’s fingers as he gently turned them. Even through the cotton tips of his gloves he could feel the texture of the hand-set type and the wood-block illustrations. He adored the feel of a hand-printed book. The love and care positively radiated off the pages. He turned to a page spread that included two of Burne-Jones’s illustrations and leaned back, letting Amanda soak in the beauty of the artistry and craftsmanship. She gave a short, soft sigh as she ran a cotton-gloved fingertip slowly across the page.
“It’s so beautiful,” she whispered reverently, and Peter looked from the page to Amanda’s face.
“So are you,” he mouthed silently, for though he had always found her face lovely, she had taken on a special glow as she pored over the book. She was enchanted, Peter thought, and he was thrilled that he had helped her feel that way. He wondered how it had never occurred to him to bring Amanda to the Devereaux Room before. Suddenly his mind was crowded with images of books from the collection that would delight her—works of the Victorians and of the medieval artists who had inspired them. In no volume, however, could the intersection of his passion for fine books and her passion for Victorian art more perfectly intersect than in this most famous example of nineteenth-century printing.
Almost hypnotized by the interplay of text, illustration, and design, Peter did not hear Amanda shift in her chair, and so the only warning he had was the slightly rough texture of her cheap cotton glove slipping across the bare flesh above his collar. Peter’s physical contact with Amanda had previously been limited to holding hands as they walked each night from the Student Center to the residential quad, an occasional embrace, and short, chaste good-night kisses at the door of Amanda’s dormitory. Like everything else about Amanda, the kisses were regimented, and Peter liked that. That quick kiss was the highlight of his day, every day, but if he had stopped to consider what else it might lead to, and how it might lead there, his dread of the unfamiliar would have invaded the peace Amanda had created in his life. But she moved so quickly in the quiet isolation of the Devereaux Room that Peter did not have time to fear the unknown. He did wonder afterward if she had planned that moment, knowing that in that room Peter would feel more comfortable than anywhere in the world.
Her cotton-gloved hand pulled his head toward her and she pressed her lips to his—not the quick, dry kiss he was used to, but an endless, open kiss with damp lips and the unmistakable feel of her tongue darting into his mouth. Her other hand reached down and pulled Peter’s arm around the small of her back and he tightened his arm around her, pulling her body into his. Peter’s eyes were closed and he had lost all sense of where they were; only Amanda’s warmth in his arms and against his lips existed. They kissed for what seemed like both an eternity and an instant. He nibbled her neck and she drew her fingers through his hair and he caressed her back and they kissed and everything disappeared except Amanda and her lips and hair and body. And then she pulled away and did the last thing he expected. She began to laugh. Peter sensed immediately that she was not laughing at him but laughing with sheer joy. Even in the dim light her eyes sparkled, and the smile he had seen briefly every night after the kiss in front of her dorm played across her face with such enthusiasm, it seemed like it would never fade.
Finally she fell back in her chair. “Look at us,” she said. “Mr. Timid and Miss Methodical, nuts about each other and making out in the rare-books room.” Only later did Peter realize this might have been a profession of love; at the time it seemed like only her delighting in the absurdity of it all. And then Amanda said the most surprising thing of all. Leaning conspiratorially into Peter, she nodded to the portrait of Amanda Devereaux watching over them and whispered, “What would Grandmother think?”
“Amanda Devereaux was your grandmother?” said Peter, removing his gloved hand from the small of Amanda’s back and turning to look at the portrait. “I can’t believe I didn’t see that. You have her eyes. Did you know her? What was she like?”
“ ‘What was she like?’ ” Amanda repeated. “Peter, I’ve just told you my big secret—the one piece of information that has chased away every guy I ever liked and attracted a bunch of creeps I couldn’t stand. Don’t you get it? I’m a superrich heiress. You’re now supposed to form all sorts of preconceived notions about me.”
Peter leaned forward and kissed her wetly on the neck, pulling her toward him. “I’m afraid all my notions about you have already been conceived.”
“Peter,” said Amanda, laughing and pushing him away. “This is a big deal for me. It’s why I enrolled in Ridgefield under my middle name. I’m not Amanda Middleton; I’m Amanda Ridgefield. You’re the first person I’ve told, and I sort of expected a reaction.”
“Look,” said Peter, settling back in his chair. “It’s no big deal. I mean it’s nice that you don’t have to worry about money and everything, but I certainly don’t want you to judge me by my family, why should I judge you by yours?”
“It is a big deal,” said Amanda. “You think so, too, I can tell. You’re smiling.” Peter could not deny it. “See, you can’t stop grinning, and you can’t even look me in the eye.”
“I’m not looking you in the eye because I’m looking at the hickey on your neck, and I’m grinning because I’m remembering how you got it.”
“You honestly don’t care that I’m like Ridgefield royalty and that I’ve got scads of money and that lots of people are going to treat me and anyone I’m dating in certain ways because of it?”
“I don’t,” said Peter, who was getting over the initial shock of discovering that his two Amandas were connected. “Let’s kiss some more.”
“And you don’t care that when you meet my parents they’re going to put you through every test you can imagine to make sure you’re good enough for precious Amanda of the Ridgefields?”
“I’d expect nothing less no matter who your parents were.” Peter leaned toward her, but she gently pushed him away.
“And you don’t care that when everybody finally figures out who I am, and they will soon enough, they’ll all think you’re after me for my money?”
“Amanda,” said Peter softly, taking her hands in his and feeling the warmth of her nervousness through the thin glove, “I don’t care about any of that stuff. I love you.” He had said it without premeditation and it seemed like the most natural and truthful thing in the world, but his declaration unintentionally brought the conversation to a much more serious level. Peter felt the tension in her hand, and grasped for a way to change the subject before she felt pressured into a response. He glanced up at the portrait of Amanda Devereaux, gazing down on her granddaughter. “Now seriously,” said Peter, standing up and pointing to the portrait. “I want to know all about Amanda Devereaux.”
He heard the tiny sigh of relief escape from Amanda’s lips as she relaxed into her chair. “Well,” she said, “she died before I was born, and Mom doesn’t talk about her much, but from the few stories I’ve heard, I gather Gran was pretty amazing.”
—
Peter did not go home that summer. He rent
ed Francis Leland’s basement apartment, where he would live for the remainder of his undergraduate career, and spent his mornings at the library assisting Hank Christiansen with restoration work and continuing to commune with the Devereaux collection. In the afternoons he mowed Francis’s yard or washed his car to help offset the rent. The two of them would sit on the broad front porch sipping iced tea and talking about books or anything else that took Francis’s fancy.
Peter saw Amanda every day. They took long walks in Ridgefield Gardens, the grounds of the former family estate now owned by the university. They went to the movies on hot afternoons and swam in the pool at Amanda’s house when her parents were out of town. “You’ll have to meet them eventually,” Amanda said, “but let’s enjoy the summer.” Other than this one mention that Peter must one day meet her parents, they did not speak of the future; they merely lived in the present. It was a perfect summer.
One weekend they drove to Wrightsville Beach in Amanda’s car, staying in separate rooms in a cheap motel three blocks from the beach. Peter had insisted on paying, and the Seaside Inn, whose glory days were long past and not particularly glorious, was the best he could afford. Amanda did not complain. They lay in the sun and ate hot dogs and ice cream and over-fried seafood, and they walked on the beach, standing ankle deep in the surf, kissing expertly. Peter had never kissed a girl before Amanda, but their frequent late-night visits to the Devereaux Room that spring had given them plenty of practice.
“Have you ever been to the beach before?” asked Amanda as they walked hand in hand through the edge of the surf.
“Fifth-grade field trip,” said Peter. “Boy, was that a miserable three days.”
“Oh? Do tell.”
“I had this crush on Rebecca Ferguson, but of course I didn’t have the nerve to do anything about it.”
“You never told me you had a girlfriend.”
“Believe me, I didn’t,” said Peter. “She only had eyes for Glenn Bailey, but I was doing that fifth-grade thing where you think if you do a grandiose enough job of brooding, the girl will notice you and take pity.”
“I would have taken pity,” said Amanda, slipping an arm around his waist.
“Trust me, you wouldn’t have. I was the world’s mopiest fifth grader. Following them while they walked on the beach holding hands, staring at her from the next table at dinner, sitting in the dark crying while they sat next to each other at the bonfire. If we’d all been thirty years older, they would have taken out a restraining order. As it was, nobody noticed.”
“Crying in the dark. You poor thing,” said Amanda. She stopped walking and wrapped both her arms around Peter, pulling him into a long, warm kiss. “So do you like the beach better this time?” she asked.
“Just a little bit,” said Peter.
Amanda gave him another quick kiss and then was off and running through the surf and Peter was chasing her and they were both laughing and he had a feeling that overcame him about once a day with Amanda—that he had never been happier in his life.
That night Peter lay awake in his room. He was still adjusting to the newness of a companion and of passionate, if chaste, physical contact. He was pleased with their tacit agreement not to sleep with each other for the time being, but his body ached for Amanda as he lay in bed replaying the sight of her in her pale blue bikini. He embraced the ache. It reminded him that Amanda was real. For the first time in his life, he knew exactly what he was aching for.
Peter took to reading love poetry, not just from the elegant cases of the Devereaux Room but from simpler shelves in the other rooms into which Special Collections spilled—rooms filled with manuscript materials and books from floor to ceiling. Occasionally Peter came across a book that he thought deserved the more honored position of a spot in the Devereaux Room. He would make his case to Francis and almost always be overruled, but Francis nonetheless encouraged Peter in this endeavor. “The best way to learn about books,” he said, “is to spend time with them, talk about them, defend them.”
Late in the summer, but not so late that the thought of the end of that idyll had yet crept into his dreams, Peter discovered a book that certainly belonged in the Devereaux Room. It was a slim pamphlet of sonnets by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. If Peter had not sought out these poems, later known as The Sonnets from the Portuguese, in their purported first edition of 1850 only a few days earlier, he might not have realized the significance of the year 1847 on the title page. Here was a private edition of some of the most famous poems of the last two centuries, printed a full three years before they made their public appearance. It was a candidate for promotion to the Devereaux Room that Francis would not be able to refuse.
“It’s a Wise book,” said Francis, when Peter showed him the pamphlet.
“I beg your pardon?” said Peter.
“Thomas Wise was one of the most distinguished bookmen of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He was a bookseller and bibliographer and he had a spectacular collection of nineteenth-century pamphlets by George Eliot, Charles Dickens, John Ruskin, and just about every other prominent Victorian writer.”
“Sounds impressive,” said Peter.
“It was,” said Francis, “until nineteen thirty-four, when two young booksellers named John Carter and Graham Pollard proved that these supposedly rare pamphlets were forgeries and that Wise was the forger. This book”—Francis tapped his forefinger on the Sonnets laying on the table—“was one of them.”
“How did they prove it?” asked Peter.
“Two ways. First they looked at what they called negative evidence. What was lacking in terms of provenance, contemporary mentions, contemporary inscriptions, anything that, had it been there, might indicate that the pamphlets really did date from the period that was claimed for them. Then they turned to positive evidence, and they really pioneered the use of scientific analysis in this field. They had the content of the paper analyzed, they compared the typeface to foundry catalogs to see when it had been cast. It was a remarkable job.”
“It sounds like Wise fooled a lot of people,” said Peter.
“He did. He was smart enough to let the pamphlets out on the market one or two at a time, so it wouldn’t be obvious they were all from the same source. Unfortunately, he seemed especially fond of preying on American collectors.”
“Like Amanda Devereaux.”
“Exactly. She was collecting at the height of Wise’s deception. The result is that we have one of the best collections of Wise forgeries outside the British Library.”
Peter picked up the now maligned copy of the Sonnets. “So I guess this belongs in the back rooms,” he said.
“I don’t think so,” said Francis. “When I first shelved the collection, it had only been about twenty years since Wise had been exposed. People still thought of his pamphlets first and foremost as fakes for which they had paid too much. But now Wise is considered among the great forgers of all time, and ironically his pamphlets are as rare as he claimed them to be. I’d say you’re quite right. It’s time we devoted a little shelf space in the Devereaux Room to Mr. Wise.”
Kingham, Saturday, February 18, 1995
Peter had seen a copy of Robert Greene’s Pandosto, on which A Winter’s Tale was based, before, but not the first edition. He had read the 1607 edition at Ridgefield when researching a paper for his sophomore Shakespeare class. The copy that lay before him now on the broad library table of Evenlode Manor was dated 1588. As soon as he saw the date he recalled a sentence in a footnote of his Shakespeare anthology. “The original 1588 edition of Pandosto is known only in a single, incomplete copy in the British Library.”
Discovering the first complete copy of the first edition of a book upon which Shakespeare based one of his plays would have been enough for Peter to feel he had fulfilled his dream of changing the course of literary history. If this copy proved genuine, and not a clever forgery, he could pro
bably sell it with one phone call to the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington for at least six figures. But the printing history of the unique book in front of Peter was perhaps the least interesting, and certainly the least valuable, thing about it. As he slowly turned the pages and examined the book, Peter heard the voice of Dr. Yoshi Kashimoto, the great Japanese champion of Edward de Vere: “If anyone could show me a single contemporary document linking the plays published under the name Shakespeare with William Shakspere of Stratford, I would recant my position and bow at the feet of the Stratfordians.” It was a sentiment that had been repeated in various forms for over a century and a half by those who claimed a variety of authors for Shakespeare’s plays. “Show us a single document,” the cries had rung out, “and we will proclaim the greatest literary mystery of all time solved.” In his trembling hands, Peter held that document.
The only previously known surviving handwriting of William Shakespeare consisted of six signatures and, possibly, a three-page manuscript passage of the play Sir Thomas More, written in collaboration with several other playwrights. Peter had examined the originals of all the examples of Shakespeare’s hand in person. The brown ink in the Thomas More fragment seemed to dance across the page in its profusion of loops and oddly angled lines, and the text sloped up as it approached the right side of the page.
Filling the margins of every page of the Pandosto he now held was that same brown ink, those same loops and lines, that same sloping text. And both the handwriting and the content of the marginalia gave every indication, under Peter’s admittedly cursory examination, that it had come from the pen of William Shakespeare. Most astounding of all was what was written on the front endpaper. Third on a list of names that Peter assumed to be owners of the book, written in the same hand as the marginalia, were the words, “W. Shakspere, Stratford.” Peter pictured Dr. Kashimoto standing before a crowd of international Shakespeare scholars and recanting his position. Mr. Peter Byerly has provided all the proof we need that William Shakspere of Stratford was the true author of the plays. Peter only wished that Amanda were waiting for him back at the cottage so he could share with her this astounding discovery.
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