The Bookman's Tale

by Charlie Lovett

  “What about getting into the chapel?” asked Liz. “Don’t you think it will be locked?”

  “Too bad I didn’t have a crowbar at home,” said Peter. “It’s not a standard tool of the antiquarian book trade.”

  “I’ve got a wheel wrench in the car,” said Liz. And with this weapon added to their arsenal, they made their way back through the village and onto the footpath that led out of Kingham and across the dark fields.

  Peter had never been on this footpath. Even in the light of day it would not have been easy to follow, with the frequent interruption of fences and hedgerows where gates or passages had to be found. In the dark it was nearly impossible, but they dared not use the flashlight. A light bouncing across the valley toward Evenlode House would be visible to anyone watching from the ridge—or from the windows of Evenlode Manor.

  After nearly an hour of creeping along, they reached the gurgling River Evenlode. High on a hill to the left they could just glimpse the gloomy silhouette of Evenlode House in the pale moonlight.

  “According to Louisa,” whispered Peter, “the chapel is at the bottom of this hill. So it should be nearby.” They made their way slowly along the riverbank until they reached a stone wall.

  “The edge of Gardner’s property?” asked Liz.

  “Must be,” said Peter. Liz nimbly climbed the wall and jumped to the other side. Peter was less agile and managed to rip the leg of his pants as he leapt to the ground. A short distance in front of them, a small clump of trees and bushes provided the only possible hiding place in the area for a chapel. “Louisa said the chapel was covered with vines,” said Peter as he pulled Liz by the hand toward the trees. “It’s got to be in here.”

  They ducked under low branches and into complete darkness. The limbs of the trees blocked out what little light the moon was still giving off through the mist that was wafting up from the river.

  “Even if we find it, how will we see to get in?” Liz asked.

  “We’ll have to risk the flashlight,” Peter answered.

  He was just fumbling in his satchel for the light when Liz cried out, “Bugger! That was not a tree. What my knee just hit was not a bloody tree.”

  “What was it?” asked Peter.

  “It feels like the corner of a stone wall,” said Liz. “And yes, I’m okay, thanks for asking.”

  Peter turned on the flashlight and held the beam low to the ground. Emerging from the ivy next to Liz’s left knee was a corner of honey yellow Cotswold limestone—not the ragged, unfinished stone of a dry-stacked field wall, but smooth, mason-finished stone. They made their way around the building, tapping the lug wrench against the ivy-covered wall but hearing only the chink, chink of metal on stone.

  “There has to be a door somewhere,” said Liz.

  “Louisa said the chapel was crumbling, but this wall seems pretty solid to me.” Peter reached to tap the wrench on the wall again and he fell forward through the ivy, hitting his hip on hard stone.

  “That hurt,” he said.

  “Tell me about it,” said Liz. “Are you inside? It’s pretty dark where I am.”

  Peter looked around and realized he was in a small porch. The archway to the outside was almost completely covered with ivy, but on the opposite side of the porch was a heavy wooden door. “I’ve found the way in,” said Peter, reaching back out through the ivy and grasping for Liz. “Give me your hand.”

  “That’s not my hand,” said Liz with a giggle, and slipped her hand into his so he could pull her through the vines.

  “You could at least buy me dinner first,” said Liz.

  “Sorry,” said Peter, blushing in the dark.

  “It’s okay, Peter. I was just teasing you. It’s something friends do. Besides, you have no idea where you grabbed me, do you?”

  “Well, I have an idea,” said Peter.

  “Perv,” said Liz, swatting him on the rump. “Now please tell me the door is unlocked.”

  Peter turned the iron ring that hung from the door and raised the latch. “So it would seem,” he said. He pushed the door open, and they stepped into the Gardner family private chapel.

  The chapel was neither as small nor as dilapidated as Peter had expected, though whether it had been restored since the previous century, or Louisa’s memory was faulty, he couldn’t tell. The nave was ten strides long and four wide, with no transepts and two steps leading up to the tiny chancel. The pitched ceiling was perhaps twenty feet high and supported by wooden beams. High on the walls were narrow, barred windows. There were no furnishings, but in addition to the many memorials on the walls, there were three freestanding tombs on which stone effigies of Gardners past lay in endless sleep.

  Peter and Liz walked slowly toward the one other structure in the room, the stone altar in the chancel. It was unmarked, except for a cross carved into the front. Peter set his bag on the smooth stone and pointed his flashlight down what would have been the aisle if there had been pews in the chapel.

  “I guess we start reading gravestones,” he said.

  Peter stepped toward the largest of the three standing tombs and was just about to read the inscription when a loud scraping noise from the back of the chapel was followed by a sickening thud.

  “The door!” cried Liz, running past Peter, who followed her. The heavy wooden door, which they had left ajar, was now firmly shut. “There wasn’t much wind tonight,” said Liz.

  “The wind couldn’t have moved this door anyway,” said Peter. He tried to turn the iron ring but it would not move, nor did the door budge when they pulled on it. Leaning against the door of what was now, effectively, their prison cell, the two said nothing for a minute. Peter expected to feel the onset of a panic attack, and even slipped his hand into his pocket to feel the bag of pills nestled there, but instead he felt strangely calm. More calm than he had since Sykes’s murder.

  “It will take them a while to get the police here this time of night,” he said. “We’d better get to work.”

  Kingham, 1878

  Phillip dipped his quill into a pot of ink he had mixed from an old recipe in the ragged leather notebook that lay open on his table. The pen glided easily over the paper as he followed the contours of the script propped in front of him. Forgery, as it turned out, was a job for which Phillip Gardner was uniquely suited. For his entire career as an artist he had been accused of being derivative and unoriginal—little better than a copyist. But as a copyist he not only excelled, he was a master. Marks on a page seemed to flow directly through his eyes and out the tip of his pen. And with guidance from the notebook, he had solved the problems of obtaining pens, paper, parchment, and ink from the period of whatever document he happened to be forging. This morning it was a letter from Lord Nelson to his mistress, Lady Emma Hamilton.

  The light from his candles glowed steadily—there was no air moving in this forgotten chamber, and Phillip had discovered that candlelight was sufficient for his work. As an artist he had occupied a wide room at the top of the house with windows facing in three directions. An artist requires light, but a forger is more in need of secrecy, and in the gloomy chamber Phillip had honed his craft.

  It had been nearly a year since Phillip had received the blackmail letter from Reginald Alderson threatening to reveal both his mistress and his bastard child to Mrs. Gardner. Phillip had lain awake all that night, wondering what to do. He seemed to be caught between two unacceptable options—handing his collection over to his family’s worst enemy, or losing Mrs. Gardner, and with her the financial ability to maintain
Evenlode House. Either option would make him reviled in the annals of the Gardner family. Not until the predawn light pressed its way through the mist and into his window did Phillip consider a possible solution. If he was no better than a copyist, as the elitist establishment of the Royal Academy claimed, then why should he not use that talent as a way out of this predicament?

  Handbooks on forgery were not easy to come by, but Phillip had read about the Shakespearean forgery of John Payne Collier years ago. Collier had eventually been unmasked by experts, but Reginald Alderson was hardly an expert. So Phillip had presented himself to Collier as a sympathetic scholar working on a history of nineteenth-century forgeries.

  “I’m sure you were just the victim of someone else’s deceit,” Phillip had said to the aging Collier. “But I thought perhaps you might provide me with some insights into the world of forgery.” His insincere flattery had netted much more than insights. Collier had presented Phillip with several of his books and, more important, with several minutes alone in his study while he went out to wash the tea things. In a lower desk drawer Phillip had discovered an old leather-bound notebook filled with notes on forgery techniques—how to make period writing instruments, obtain old paper and parchment, mix ink from different periods, and make new documents look old. It had been a simple matter to abscond with this volume. Whether it was written by Collier or someone else he neither knew nor cared; the important thing was that it worked.

  —

  Benjamin Mayhew sat in a corner of the drawing room of an exclusive club with a cigar in one hand and a glass of brandy in the other. His host, William Henry Smith, had been holding forth for some time now on his theory that Francis Bacon wrote the works of William Shakespeare—a theory to which he had given no public voice in many years but which, when prodded by Benjamin, he was happy to explicate. On the shelf of Benjamin’s office, barely a mile distant, stood a book that could shatter Smith’s theory. Smith was not only one of Benjamin’s oldest clients, he was by far the most highly placed. Benjamin had come to enjoy his occasional evenings as a guest in a club he could never hope to join on his own merits. As a servant refilled his brandy snifter, he thought he might do more than just hide the Pandosto to protect the reputation of his old friend.

  —

  “Did you ever catch up with Mr. Collier?” Benjamin asked Phillip Gardner as the two sat in the room above Benjamin’s bookshop.

  “I did,” said Gardner. “Interesting old man. He gave me copies of some of his books for my collection. Of course I told him I believed he was just an innocent victim. I think he was senile enough to believe me.”

  “Probably believes it himself,” said Benjamin. “Still, he was a brilliant man in his day.”

  “You think forgery is brilliant?” said Gardner.

  “It’s an art form, isn’t it?”

  “If you can call fraud an art form,” said Gardner.

  “What if I told you,” said Benjamin, “that one of these documents is a forgery?” He indicated with a sweep of his hand four items spread across the table—items that Benjamin had gone to great pains to obtain in order to pose this question to Gardner. There were two parchment court documents from the fifteenth century and two letters from the eighteenth. None of them concerned anyone of importance, thus Benjamin could trust that Gardner would look at them without an acquisitive eye, a condition that, he knew all too well, could lead to blindness.

  Gardner examined the documents for several minutes, holding each one up to the light at various angles before laying it down and picking up the next. Finally he picked up a letter dated 1756, ran a finger across the surface of the paper, and almost immediately produced a short snort.

  “Well, it’s clearly this one,” he said. “And I must say it’s a pretty poor job.”

  “What makes you say that?” said Benjamin, convinced already that his suspicions about Gardner were correct.

  “Feel the way the pen has scraped the paper,” said Gardner. “That doesn’t happen with a quill. This was written with a metal-nib pen and those weren’t mass-produced until the eighteen twenties. It’s an ordinary household letter, so I think you can safely assume it would have been written with something that was widely available, and in seventeen fifty-six metal-nib pens were anything but.” Gardner tossed the letter back on the table dismissively.

  “You sound like an expert,” said Benjamin.

  “As I told you, I’ve been collecting books on forgery. One has to protect oneself, you know.”

  “Yes, but books on forgery can’t show you what paper feels like when it’s been written on with a metal nib,” said Benjamin. “But don’t worry, your secret is safe with me.”

  “What secret?”

  “There are only two sorts of people who could have detected this forgery so quickly,” said Benjamin, holding the letter up. “Someone with extensive experience in the field of forensic detection or an experienced forger. You are not the former; I can only assume you are the latter.”

  “Are you accusing me of being a forger?” said Gardner.

  “I wouldn’t call it an accusation exactly,” said Benjamin, “more of a compliment.” Ever since the day when Reginald Alderson had first failed to bid against Phillip Gardner, Benjamin had suspected something odd was going on. Gardner’s sudden interest in forgery had further aroused his suspicion. The only explanation he could imagine was that Gardner was passing off forged copies of documents to Alderson—for what reason he could not imagine.

  “See here,” said Gardner. “What are you playing at? Are you the one who told Alderson about Isabel?”

  “I beg your pardon?” said Benjamin, who could see no connection between the young American whose letters he had been asked to hold for Gardner and the present conversation about forgery.

  “He’s blackmailing me, you know,” said Gardner angrily. “Reginald Alderson’s threatened to tell Mrs. Gardner. I need hardly tell you that if she found out, you would lose a very good customer.”

  “My dear fellow,” said Benjamin, smiling. “I’ve no intention of telling Mrs. Gardner anything. And frankly I had forgotten all about your young female friend. I’m simply in the market for a good forger—a better forger than the man who wrote the letter you so quickly unmasked.”

  “I see,” said Gardner, calming down. He picked up the forged letter from the table and chuckled quietly before wadding it up and tossing it onto the fire. “In that case,” he said, “you’ve come to the right man. It just so happens that I am a superb forger.”

  Ridgefield, 1988

  Within a few months of their return from the honeymoon, Peter had agreed with Amanda’s proposal that, so long as they lived modestly, they could spend some of what she delicately referred to as her “independent income.” His business was growing slowly, and Amanda was beginning to get work as an interior decorator, but a little extra income meant that after a year in an apartment they could move into a small house in an older neighborhood not far from campus. The house needed work, and Peter spent his weekends learning how to scrape paint, refinish floors, and hang drywall. “It’s like binding a book,” he said to Amanda one day when he came in for lunch covered with paint. “Only bigger.” The summer before they bought the house they had traveled to England again. It was the first of what would become semiannual book-buying trips. They flew economy class and stayed in bed-and-breakfasts where the bathroom was usually down the hall. Amanda never complained.

  —

  In the spring of 1993, when Peter saw that their next trip to England would coincide with their fifth anniversary, he thought maybe the time was right to travel a little less frugally.

  “You’ve got some new clients,” he said to Amanda in bed one night, “and so do I. Why don’t we stay in hotels this time?”

  “I kind of like those little places in the country,” said Amanda, “but we should definitely spend our anniversary night at The
Ritz.” And so they had. Peter had forgotten how good those sheets felt.

  A week later, wandering the Cotswolds in search of bookshops, Peter and Amanda happened upon the village of Kingham and decided to have a picnic lunch on the village green.

  “It’s just a perfect village, isn’t it?” said Amanda, as they lounged in the grass after lunch.

  “It’s peaceful,” said Peter. “We should stay here a couple of days.”

  “Do you think there’s any place to stay?” said Amanda.

  And so they had wandered around the village looking for accommodation and had found a FOR SALE sign in front of a terraced cottage. Afterward they couldn’t remember who had first suggested it, but standing in the cool May breeze in front of that empty cottage they suddenly saw themselves inside.

  “It needs work,” said Peter.

  “We come to England all the time,” said Amanda. “It would be nice to have a home base.”

  “It would,” said Peter. And he had an intense vision of a crackling fire in the grate, a cup of tea in his hand, and Amanda reading a good book on a damp winter day. It was as seductive as anything he had ever imagined.

  “Why not?” said Amanda. “We can afford it.”

  “You can afford it,” said Peter.

  “I haven’t given you an anniversary present yet,” said Amanda.

  And without further discussion it had been decided. They hadn’t set foot in the cottage, they had been in Kingham for a little over an hour, but it felt right. Three months later Peter and Amanda owned a cottage in England; two months after that the slow process of renovation began.

  —

  “Thank you,” said Peter to Amanda as they lay in their bed in Ridgefield on the night the sale became final.

  “For what?” said Amanda.

  “For the cottage,” said Peter.