The Bookman's Tale

The Bookman's Tale Page 29

by Charlie Lovett

  You will be pleased to learn that I shall not bid against you next week at the auction of royal documents. I shall expect the pieces to arrive at my home within a week of the sale. You should not expect a commission.

  Reginald Alderson

  “The blackmail letter,” said Liz.

  “Exactly,” said Peter. He laid the letter down and excitedly reached for the next item from the envelope. It was a small sheet of correspondence paper, on which a letter was written in a cramped, shaky hand.

  My Dearest Phillip,

  I send this letter through your bookseller Mr. Mayhew as you asked, and I promise it will be the last, but I must tell you that your son and I are safely arrived in America. My family is more understanding than you might believe and so I have not, as you suggested, invented a fiction about a foundling. Both Miss Prickett and myself have been honest with my family about the events of the past months. All my father has requested is that young Phillip be raised with our family name, not the name of Gardner. With all the love and acceptance he has shown to his fallen daughter, I cannot but honor his request. Please know that, whatever I was to you, you shall never be replaced in my affections.

  Always, your Isabel

  “So she moved back to America,” said Liz.

  There was one more sheet of paper lying on the table. “This one is written by Gardner, too,” said Peter, glancing at the signature. But it’s not addressed to anyone. It just starts.” And Peter read.

  I am not in the habit of making confessions, but if I have cared little in this life for my wife or what family is left to me; if I have proven a failure in both my career and my finances; if morals have never been high among my priorities, one thing I have nurtured and cared for: my collection. Whatever dark impulses first impelled me to collect, I have come to realize that in those letters and manuscripts and documents lies my one chance to impart something to the world. Despite the threat of financial and marital ruin that he held over me, I would no more pass these treasures to Mr. Reginald Alderson than I would destroy them. Thus I here confess that through the circumstance of my neighbor’s blackmailing I discovered my true calling as an artist. Some may call it forgery; for me it was merely preservation—preservation of my own peace for a short time, preservation of my collection forever.

  While this confession is for those of my heirs who may one day find it and resurrect that collection, I have written a companion to Mr. Alderson in which it was my great pleasure to inform him that the documents he has extorted from me these past two years are as worthless as my watercolors that he blocked from proper exhibition. A few of these hang on the walls of friends’ homes, the rest I have destroyed, except for a select group I have sent along to Mr. Alderson. I relish the thought of his descendants one day singing their praises. To ensure that Mr. Alderson will not fool others as I have fooled him, I have included in each of my forgeries a clue to its origin; my technique is, I believe, undetectable, but a careful reading of the text of each document will reveal a flaw. Thus the Aldersons, in perpetuity, will be forced to live with my duping of their forebear.

  For a few hours after my death, Mr. Alderson may believe he has won, and that he possesses a great literary relic—the book I shall deliver to him shortly. Then, my final letter to Mr. Alderson will arrive, and he will know the truth not just about this greatest relic, but about all the documents he believes are so valuable. Revenge shall be mine at the last.

  I hope that whatever ancestor made the secret of this crypt did so to provide nefarious access to the Aldersons, not friendly commerce. In any case, I shall use that secret not just to deliver my final forgery but also to make a gift to Reginald Alderson of my small collection of books on that art. Whether he shall notice that they have inexplicably appeared on his shelves I may never know.

  To Mrs. Gardner, I make no apologies. To my Isabel, should she ever see this, I profess that at the end, I thought only of you, my beloved. Forgive me my wrongs and be blessed.

  Phillip Gardner, November 22, 1879

  “No wonder the box at Evenlode Manor said ‘not to be sold,’” said Peter. “Every document in there is a forgery.”

  “And these must be the originals,” said Liz, pulling the rest of the papers out of the box.

  “Exactly,” said Peter, looking quickly through the stack of documents. “It’s so bizarre to see these, because I’ve seen them all before.”

  “What about the Pandosto?” said Liz. “Could that be the ‘great literary relic’?”

  Peter pulled the book from his case and opened it on the table. “‘A careful reading of the text of each document will reveal a flaw,’” he said. “I’ve examined the text pretty carefully.”

  “How about the marginalia? Without that it’s just a rare book, right?”

  “I read all that, too,” said Peter.

  “Yes,” said Liz, “but you read it as someone who was excited to discover a great Shakespeare relic, not someone looking for a flaw.” Liz began scanning the margin notes.

  “What do you think he meant by ‘flaw’?” said Peter.

  “Something that’s not right textually, I suppose,” said Liz. “Some reference to something Shakespeare couldn’t have known, or an anachronism. You know, Hermione wearing a digital watch. That sort of thing.” Peter looked over Liz’s shoulder as she turned the page and ran her finger slowly down the scrawled script in the margins. Though it seemed less possible every minute, a part of him still wanted to believe that William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon had written those notes. He had relished the thought of the day he would show the Pandosto to Francis Leland—the apprentice presenting the Holy Grail to his master. It was a fantasy he wasn’t quite ready to give up.

  “What year did Shakespeare die?” asked Liz, her fingertip pausing near the bottom of a page.

  “Sixteen sixteen,” said Peter. “Why?”

  “Bloody hell! Listen to this. ‘Death of Garinter unjust as in execution of Raleigh.’”

  “We don’t know what Shakespeare thought of Raleigh’s execution,” said Peter. “He might have felt it was unjust.”

  “You’re wrong, Peter. We know exactly what Shakespeare thought of Raleigh’s execution.”

  “Liz, trust me, I’ve read the literature, and . . .”

  “Peter, we know what Shakespeare thought. He thought nothing. Because Shakespeare had been dead for two years when Raleigh was executed.”

  “Raleigh was beheaded in sixteen eighteen,” said Peter, suddenly remembering the date from his English history class. “How could I have missed that?”

  “It’s subtle,” said Liz, “and you weren’t looking for it.”

  Peter watched the Holy Grail dissolve into a fascinating example of nineteenth-century forgery. Judging from the presence of a printing press in Gardner’s lair, Peter guessed that not even the text was authentic, though it had probably been copied from a genuine first edition of Pandosto. It might fetch as much as a few thousand pounds at auction, so it couldn’t be said to be worthless, but it was far from extraordinary. His burning question of the past week answered, he was suddenly struck by the harsh reality of his situation. He was trapped underground in a remote country chapel. He was the prime suspect in a brutal murder, with a raft of evidence implicating him. And he was now the caretaker of a book that would make the tiniest ripple in Shakespeare studies, and pass completely unnoticed in the broader world.

  “I’ll bet Mayhew commissioned Gardner to make the Pandosto forgery,” said Liz, who still seem
ed excited about unraveling the book’s mystery. “He told Gardner to leave a textual clue just like he had in his other forgeries. He must have planned for it to surface and be revealed as a fake. That would have been an embarrassment to the Stratfordians.”

  “And it would make his friend William H. Smith look good at the same time.”

  “What was all that about ‘nefarious access’ to the Aldersons and secretly putting books into their library?” said Liz, picking up Gardner’s deathbed confession.

  “‘I hope that whatever ancestor made the secret of this crypt did so to provide nefarious access to the Aldersons, not friendly commerce,’” read Peter.

  “You don’t think . . .”

  “There must be a passage,” said Peter. “A passage that leads from here to Evenlode Manor.”

  “But why?” said Liz.

  “Who knows why,” said Peter, grabbing the flashlight from her and shining it into the back of an alcove. “Even Phillip Gardner didn’t know why. Maybe it was some sort of Romeo and Juliet thing.” Peter found nothing but a solid wall and hurriedly moved to the next alcove. “Or maybe the feud between the families was just for show—at first, I mean. This chapel has to be at least four hundred years old, judging from the tombs. Here, help me move these boards.”

  He had come to the alcove that contained nothing more than a pile of old lumber leaning up against the back wall. It took him and Liz several minutes to clear the boards away, during which the quiet of the crypt gave way to the banging of wood on stone as they hurled the lumber from the wall. When the last plank had been cast to the floor, the quiet returned, though dust still swirled in the air and stuck to Peter’s sweaty face. He picked up the flashlight and trained it into the alcove where it shone on the back wall. There, in the center of the arch, was a narrow door made of rough planks. Peter pulled the handle and the door swung open, revealing a flight of stone steps leading down into darkness.

  Kingham, 1879

  Every great artist, thought Phillip Gardner, has his masterpiece, and the forgery of the Pandosto, which took him nearly a year to complete, was his. True, there was a certain frustration that this masterpiece must go unheralded, but knowing that it would ultimately bring embarrassment to the Alderson family was reward enough.

  Phillip had started by covering the endpapers of the book with new paper—concealing all evidence to the casual observer that the scribblings in the margins were those of William Shakespeare, for the proper forgery of the Pandosto would require outside assistance, and he had no wish to raise suspicions. Next he had the text of each page photographed. He was careful to choose a photographer who had no higher education and no connections to the book trade. A studio in Manchester fit his needs perfectly.

  In the meantime, he began, with help from Benjamin Mayhew, to collect the paper on which the Pandosto would be printed. The book was a quarto, so by neatly slicing blank pages out of the backs of folio volumes from the same time period, Phillip was able to collect sheets on which four pages of the new Pandosto could be printed. He could then fold these sheets in half for binding.

  The next step was to convert the photographs into zinc plates from which the text could be printed. After masking out the marginalia on the photographs, he told the owner of the workshop in Birmingham where he ordered the plates that he was making a facsimile of an obscure old book for scholarly purposes. Three weeks later he collected the photographs and the zinc plates. The former he tossed into the drawing room fire; the latter he used to print Pandosto’s text on the paper that he and Mayhew had collected. He had mixed a large batch of ink from one of Collier’s recipes for this purpose, and Mayhew had helped him find and purchase a hand printing press, which he had spent some months learning to master.

  Zincographic printing does not leave as deep an impression on the paper as hand-set type, so once the printing was complete, Phillip embarked on the most tedious part of his work. Taking a tiny, smoothed piece of bone, he traced each letter, pressing just hard enough to imitate the impression made by sixteenth-century movable type. He had practiced this technique for weeks on scrap paper before he learned to apply just the right amount of pressure—his early attempts had left the paper riddled with holes and tears.

  When he had completed the forging of the text, Phillip set about the fun part—meticulously copying the marginalia using a quill, a batch of sixteenth-century ink, and his expert eye and steady hand. All his practice in document forging now came to bear, as he copied each smudge and smear to perfection. He made only a single change, adding the line that would be the undoing of both the Pandosto and Reginald Alderson: “Death of Garinter unjust as in execution of Raleigh.”

  In the course of his work on the forgery, Phillip had become interested in all aspects of the book arts, and while he was far from an expert binder, he had collected some binding tools and equipment and had some modest success rebinding several of his own books. To bind his Pandosto, however, he merely bought a book of similar size in an old leather binding and sewed the newly printed text block into the old cover. At the same time, he removed the false endpapers from the original Pandosto, revealing once again the list of owners.

  “It’s a beautiful job,” said Benjamin Mayhew, paging through the forged Pandosto.

  “It’s not quite done,” said Phillip. “I still need to scuff the edges of the pages. I almost hate to give it up to Alderson. It’s become . . . well, I’ve become close to that particular bit of forgery.”

  “We shouldn’t become too close to our books,” said Mayhew. “They are only objects, after all.”

  “Ah, but you are a bookseller, not a book collector. Besides, this one is my own creation.”

  “That should bring you all the more satisfaction when Alderson is made a fool.”

  “What is your plan exactly?” said Phillip.

  “I’ve made all the arrangements,” said Mayhew. “A colleague of mine will offer your Pandosto to Alderson for an irresistible price. This colleague will pretend not to know what he has. When Alderson makes the book public, my friend William Smith will reveal it as a forgery, thanks to your little clue. Smith will be happy because the Stratfordians will be embarrassed; you will be happy because Alderson will be embarrassed; and I shall be happy because my two best customers are happy. Now, I’ve a little something to make Pandosto look even better to Alderson.”

  Mayhew showed Phillip a beautiful leather-backed case from which he withdrew an elaborate folder. Into this he laid Phillip’s masterpiece, carefully refolding the flaps and then slipping it back into the case.

  “Properly imposing,” said Phillip, taking the sumptuous case from Benjamin. “But what did you do with the original?”

  “I shall see to it,” said Benjamin.

  “It seems a shame to destroy it.”

  “No choice, my good man, no choice. Your forgery preserves all the real marginalia for future generations. Some enterprising scholar will ferret out that you couldn’t possibly have made all that up.”

  “I wonder,” said Phillip, “if you might provide me with a bill of sale. Just so I can know that I owned it, however briefly.”

  “I don’t see why not,” said Benjamin. “And as for the rest, leave it all to me.”

  —

  Phillip wanted to feel triumphant as he mounted the steps of Evenlode House on his return from London and his meeting with Benjamin Mayhew. He had created a masterpiece, fulfilled his first commission as an artist, and ensured the eventual public embarrassment of Reginald Alderson. However, he had also been complicit in the destruction of a great literary treasure. He was one of only two men alive who knew with absolute certainty the true identity of that greatest of English authors, and he had agreed to take that secret to his grave.

  He was just turning the handl
e when the front door jerked open. Standing before him, a letter clasped in her hand and a look of fury on her face, was a woman he had not seen in some days.

  “Good afternoon, Mrs. Gardner,” he said.

  “Mr. Gardner, when we married I demanded only one thing from you in exchange for my substantial financial support of both you and your estate—fidelity. Perhaps it seems an odd thing to desire from a man whom I neither love nor respect, but call it my little eccentricity.”

  “Yes, I had a lovely trip to London,” said Phillip, striding into the entrance hall past his wife. “Thank you for asking.”

  “Was it as lovely as the trips you took to London to see Isabel?” said Mrs. Gardner.

  Ridgefield, 1994

  Peter remembered with photographic accuracy the moment when Amanda told him she had a headache. It hadn’t seemed important at the time so Peter didn’t know why he remembered that moment so well, but he did. They had just returned from their final visit to London to find news of another delay in the renovations of their cottage in Kingham, and Amanda, who usually brushed off such delays with a laugh and a comment about contractors being the same the world over, had slammed her fist on the telephone table in frustration.

  “I’m starting to think I’m never going to see this project done,” she said.

 

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