The Bookman's Tale

by Charlie Lovett

  “Peter, is that you?” Her cheeks rosy from the cold, and the mist of her warm breath dissolving in the midday sun, Liz Sutcliffe stood next to Peter, a perplexed smile on her face. “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  Peter leaned forward, his hands on his knees, trying to catch his breath. Liz waited patiently, as she might for a dog or a small child. Finally he was able to gasp, “Murder.”

  “I beg your pardon?” said Liz, still smiling maternally, as if Peter were playing some sort of game that proved him an exceptionally clever six-year-old.

  “Sykes,” said Peter. “Graham Sykes has been murdered.”

  Liz yanked Peter up by his arm so she could look him in the eye. “What the bloody hell are you talking about?”

  “I went to see him,” said Peter, still panting, “and this morning he was murdered.”

  “Fuck,” exhaled Liz. “How do you know?”

  “I saw him,” said Peter. “It was awful. It was so awful.” He felt the nausea and chills returning as he remembered the scene; this time he felt not panic but revulsion and grief. A tear ran down his cold cheek. “They cut his throat,” he whispered.

  “Jesus fuck,” said Liz, the color draining from her face. “Bollocks!”

  “I’m so sorry,” said Peter. “I was supposed to keep him out of danger. I was supposed to warn him but he was . . . we were arguing and . . .” He recalled the argument with Sykes the night before. If Peter hadn’t been so stubborn, he might have remembered to warn Sykes about the threat from Thomas Gardner. Now all he could see was the face of the dead man, and all that blood. “It was horrible,” he said.

  “How could this happen?” said Liz.

  Her question hung in the crisp air for a moment as Peter tried to banish the image of Sykes’s body. “I’ll explain everything,” he said at last, taking a deep breath and feeling he was pulling himself back from an abyss. “But we’ve got to get you out of here first.”

  “What do you mean?” said Liz. “What does this have to do with me?”

  “They ransacked your office, Liz,” said Peter. “And they may already be at your flat.” Before he could stop her, Liz fled down the road. Peter caught up to her just as she stopped across the street from her home. A glass panel in the street door had been smashed, and a window on the second floor flung open. Below the window several piles of books and papers lay on the pavement. Liz stood wide-eyed before the scene. Afraid that Thomas and Julia might still be in the flat, Peter slipped an arm around Liz and guided her farther down the block.

  “We have to leave London,” he said when they were around the corner. “Now.”

  “My car’s in the next street,” said Liz quietly, and she slipped her hand into Peter’s and pulled him down the block. When she had edged her Citroën into the line of traffic moving up Haverstock Hill toward Hampstead, she asked Peter where they were going.

  “Kingham,” said Peter, who had already given the matter some thought. Even though that meant going back to the murderers, he thought he might be able to keep up the pretense of doing business with John Alderson long enough to solve the mystery of the Pandosto and perhaps find some evidence that would both exonerate himself and implicate Julia Alderson and Thomas Gardner in Sykes’s murder.

  Not until they were well under way did Liz ask, “What were they after?”

  “They were after Sykes’s manuscript,” said Peter. “They didn’t find it at his cottage because he had already posted it to you. I assume they didn’t find it at your office, or they wouldn’t have come to your flat, unless . . .”

  “Unless what?” said Liz.

  “Well, they didn’t just try to get the manuscript from Sykes, they killed him—I think because he knew what was in it. It’s not so bad if they found the manuscript at your flat. I’m just glad they didn’t find you.”

  “They didn’t find the manuscript either,” said Liz.

  “How do you know?” said Peter.

  “Because I spent my morning on Hampstead Heath reading it,” said Liz, reaching into her bag and pulling out a bound sheaf of papers. “It’s right here.”

  Ridgefield, 1986

  Peter had replayed in his mind a hundred times in the past two days the conversation that he and Amanda had had just a few weeks ago on the night she had given him the Volvo. After a second round of lovemaking, they lay side by side, their hands loosely nestled together, gazing at the high ceiling.

  “Did you like being an only child?” Amanda had asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Peter. “I guess if I’d had a little brother, I would have had someone to talk to. I might be more . . . socialized. But then I would have worried about him growing up in that house. I’m good at worrying.”

  “I’d have liked a little sister,” said Amanda.

  “Not an older one?” said Peter.

  “No. I guess since I was first and I always thought another might come along, I never dreamed of an older one. But I used to wish I had a baby sister. To take care of, you know. I want my kids to have siblings.”

  “How many?” said Peter, after a long pause.

  “Do you mean how many kids would I like?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Three or four,” said Amanda. “If the first three are all boys, I might try once more for a girl.”

  “So you’d like girls?” Peter asked, suddenly seeing himself and Amanda walking through a park with two dark-haired toddlers wearing frilly pink dresses. He found the vision equally frightening and enthralling.

  “I’d like at least one of each,” said Amanda. “But I’m realistic. What about you?”

  “I’d like any kids that had you as a mother,” said Peter, and Amanda lay her head on his chest and fell almost instantly asleep.

  After that, Amanda would sometimes make a seemingly offhand comment—though Peter knew there was no such thing with her—about wanting her daughter to take ballet lessons or hoping that her son would apply to schools other than Ridgefield. Peter began to picture himself as a stay-at-home dad, writing antiquarian book catalogs in his home office while the children napped.

  Now he sat at the bedside of the woman who would never bear children and gently woke her.

  “How are you feeling?” said Peter.

  “Better,” said Amanda. “Stronger. I think I can sit up.” Peter pressed a button and the bed raised Amanda to a sitting position.

  “Not as bolt upright as you like,” said Peter.

  “Still,” said Amanda, “I feel more human.”

  “We need to talk,” said Peter.

  “That doesn’t sound good,” said Amanda. “Besides, I thought the girl was supposed to say that.”

  “A couple of things have happened while you were sick.”

  “Peter, you’re scaring me. Did somebody die?”

  “Nobody died,” said Peter. “It’s just that you had a pretty bad infection.”

  “But they said it was clearing up.”

  “It is. It is clearing up. You’re going to be fine. It’s just that . . .”

  “I’m not going to be fine, am I?”

  “The infection got into your ovaries,” said Peter, taking her hand. “We’re going to have to rethink the whole children issue.”

  “Oh,” said Amanda softly, looking away from Peter for the first time in the conversation. She stared out the window at the pale blue summer sky for a long minute before Peter pulled her back toward him. He made no attempt to wipe away the tears trickling down her cheek. “It’s just that I . . .”

  “I know,” said Peter. “We both did.” They sat quietly for a long time, Amanda’s hand resting limply in his. Peter felt he should give the news a chance to settle before he went on. Finally, when he could bear the silence no longer, he said, “There’s something else, too. Some good news.”

  “I could use some good news,�
�� said Amanda, forcing a smile as she drew her sleeve across her eyes. Peter gripped her hand more firmly and slipped out of his chair. “Did you lose something?” asked Amanda, as he knelt on the floor by her bed.

  “Yes,” said Peter. “About two years ago. I lost my heart.”

  “Peter, what are you doing?”

  “Amanda Ridgefield,” said Peter—and to his own surprise he felt not panic but supreme peace as he said it, “will you marry me?”

  Amanda began to cry again, but Peter thought he saw a smile behind her tears. He got back up and pulled a ring from his pocket. “What do you think?” he said. Before she could stop him, he slipped it onto her finger.

  “Peter, it’s . . . it’s beautiful.” She was sobbing now, and Peter waited patiently for her to compose herself. After a few moments, she slipped her hand from his and reached for a tissue.

  “I don’t want you to marry me because you feel sorry for me,” said Amanda.

  “I don’t feel sorry for you,” said Peter. “Look, we can adopt, we can do all sorts of things. I’m prepared to do a lot of things to make you . . . to make us happy. The one thing I’m not prepared to do is leave this room without being engaged to you.”

  “And this isn’t a sympathy proposal?”

  “Amanda, you know me. You know us. You know how much I love you. Why do you think I’ve been buying and selling all these books? To make money for this.” He pointed to her ring, which already looked like a natural part of her hand.

  “Really?” said Amanda.

  “Really,” said Peter.

  “Okay then, Peter Byerly. Yes.”

  Though Peter often mourned the scar on Amanda’s heart left by her inability to bear children, he never regretted choosing that moment to propose to her. He had been planning to buy the ring after he had sold his Volvo full of books and to propose on Halloween in the Devereaux Room, but he felt a need to balance Amanda’s grief, and her family’s grief, with joy. Charlie and Sarah were nearly as happy as Amanda when they saw the ring on their daughter’s finger and heard the news.

  “I’m gonna call you ‘son’ now,” said Charlie, clapping Peter on the back in a gesture that failed to hide the depth of his emotion. “I hope you won’t mind that.”

  “No,” said Peter, “I won’t mind at all.”

  Peter drove Amanda home five days later. He spent the rest of the summer in a guest room in the Ridgefield house, helping nurse his fiancée back to health. Amanda seemed to be her old self, sitting in the study reading, laughing and teasing Peter in the kitchen and around the pool, even making love when her parents had gone to New York for the weekend. But from that time on there was between Amanda and Peter a small unspoken barrier, which had not been there before, around the topic of children. He rarely noticed it, but once in a while, when they saw a baby in a restaurant or flipped past a channel playing a Disney movie, Peter felt it—this slight awkwardness, as if they were friends who had accidentally seen each other naked. Peter would learn that marriages acquire such scars, but it was this blemish on their absolute intimacy, even more than Amanda’s barrenness, that grieved him. That he never had the courage to talk to Amanda about it was something he would regret for the rest of his life.

  Kingham, 1876

  By the time his son was born, Phillip Gardner had finally persuaded Isabel to be reasonable, though it had not been easy. The first several times he had visited her following the meeting at Fortnum’s, she had insisted that she did not want money from him but affection and a father for her child. He had explained that these were the only two things he could not provide. It was Miss Prickett, in the end, who helped Isabel to see the hopelessness of her situation, and for that Phillip had been grateful.

  When the child was old enough to travel, it was decided that Isabel would return to America. The child would be presented as a foundling whom Isabel had discovered outside her art school and from whom no power of Miss Prickett could part her. Isabel conceded that her parents would willingly adopt the child and raise it as part of her family. In the meantime, Phillip would be available for whatever Isabel might need, within reason. He would arrange for a doctor, should that prove necessary, and he agreed to pay a small stipend not to Isabel, who would not accept it, but to Miss Prickett, who would use it to buy clothes and such for the baby.

  Isabel could continue to contact him through Benjamin Mayhew, but Phillip had directed Mayhew not to forward messages to Kingham. Phillip could find an excuse to come up to London and check in with his bookseller at least once a week—for anything that required more expedient attention, Miss Prickett would have to do.

  Since their conversation in Fortnum’s, Phillip and Isabel had continued to meet on a regular basis, though those meetings were entirely chaste. As Isabel reached the last months of her confinement, Phillip’s visits to her lodgings were generally limited to a short conversation with Miss Prickett confirming Isabel’s health. As for the needs of the flesh, Phillip had felt curiously uninterested in such activities since his discovery of Isabel’s condition. He avoided Covent Garden.

  The child, known to his father only as Phillip, was born on a cold morning in late November. Miss Prickett dispatched a letter to Benjamin Mayhew at once, but Phillip had accompanied Mrs. Gardner on a trip to Yorkshire to visit her niece and did not arrive in London until just before Christmas. The first time he laid eyes on his only son, the boy was three weeks old. Isabel had expressed, in Phillip’s prolonged absence, an intense desire not to see her son’s father, so Miss Prickett carried the sleeping child into the sitting room, where she offered the bundle to Phillip.

  “I think it’s best that you hold him, Miss Prickett,” Phillip had said. He was appalled at the thought that such a young child should be offered by its de facto nurse to what amounted to a total stranger.

  “I suppose you’re right about that, Mr. Gardner.” She sat with the child in her arms for a few minutes, then returned to the nursery. In her absence, Phillip showed himself out.

  Walking the cold and dim streets of London, up to Hyde Park where he had once strolled so innocently with Isabel under the summer sun, then on the long walk to Trafalgar Square and up Fleet Street to Benjamin Mayhew’s office, Phillip decided that he must not see his son again. He had barely glimpsed the boy’s face, but seeing the child, coming face-to-face with the reality of what had happened, had left him torn. This evidence of his sins engendered in Phillip the most horrific feeling of shame and disgust he had ever experienced. At the same time, he was overcome by the sense of connection he felt with that peaceful infant. This was his son, his rightful heir, whom he must never know. Phillip could not bear the thought of returning to the emotional blackness that lay in that narrow space between love and shame. In a few months Isabel and the boy would be gone forever. Until then, he would avoid London.

  —

  The wind blowing down from Churchill howled around the eaves of Evenlode House on a March afternoon, as the sun hung low in the pale blue Cotswold sky. Phillip did not envy the workmen who were laying stone high up on the top floor of the new west wing. Mrs. Gardner was once again in Yorkshire visiting her niece, who was not well. Phillip had stayed behind to supervise the work, though today it needed little supervising, and he had remained in his study all day, answering correspondence and reading. He had just put another log on the fire and had settled into his favorite chair when the housekeeper—she was new and Phillip would keep forgetting her name—appeared in the doorway, silent as a ghost.

  “Yes, what is it?” said Phillip, not pleased at the disturbance.

  “A young woman and her companion to see you,” she said. “Not knowing the young lady or your wishes, I asked she stay at the door. She’s got a . . . well, I was not sure you’d be wanting her in the parlor, sir.”

  —

  From an upper window of Evenlode Manor, Reginald Alderson squinted into the eyepiece of a long brass telesco
pe, trained on his neighbor’s front door a mile and a half away. It had proved useful to pay the stationmaster a few pounds to inform him whenever Mrs. Gardner left the village, but he did wish that she might have left sooner. Nonetheless, Reginald was a patient man. He had been patient all the days he had followed Phillip Gardner through the streets of London, and had been rewarded by seeing him speaking with a young American in the Royal Academy. He had been patient in following the girl and discovering her lodgings. He had been patient in waiting for the girl’s companion to take a day off—a day when he had placed himself next to Miss Prickett on the train to Brixton and had the first of several useful conversations.

  “It’s quite a coincidence,” he had said, “that I travel to Brixton by this route every Thursday as well.”

  He had been patient in waiting for Mrs. Gardner to take an extended journey without her husband, but once she had departed, the final phase of his plan had swung into action. Phillip Gardner had written Reginald a taunting letter two years ago, not long after he had married Mrs. Gardner, offering to purchase Reginald’s collection of historical documents. Thankfully, Reginald had saved this obscenity, and he had little trouble copying the script in writing the letter that now summoned Isabel, Miss Prickett, and the child to Evenlode House. When Gardner had turned them out, knowing as he must that Mrs. Gardner was due to return that evening, Reginald would conveniently meet them just outside the gate and offer his dear friend Miss Prickett and her young charges lodgings for the night. Once the trio were ensconced in Evenlode Manor, the rest would be easy.

  Ridgefield, 1986

  Early in the fall of his senior year at Ridgefield, Peter was reading an assignment for his medieval history class in the Devereaux Room when Francis Leland dropped a dusty cardboard box on the table in front of him.