The Bookman's Tale

by Charlie Lovett

  “Extraordinary,” said John.

  “My friend here is a bit claustrophobic,” said Peter. “And we were in there quite some time.”

  “I’d heard of such a passage,” said John. “My grandfather used to tell tales about secret commerce between the Aldersons and the Gardners—cooperation going on underground while the feud raged above. I never believed it until Thomas Gardner showed up drunk in my library one night.”

  “Then you knew?” said Peter.

  “Oh yes,” said John, “though I never had the courage to take the trip myself. Like your friend, I’m not fond of tight spots.” He closed the door to the passage, which disappeared seamlessly into the paneling, and handed Peter his satchel. “Mr. Gardner used the tunnel on several occasions, though he never found what I’d hoped he would in his family crypt.”

  Before Peter could catch her eye to silence her, Liz, who seemed much recovered, said, “Do you mean Phillip Gardner’s document collection? We found it.”

  “You did, did you?” said John, smiling. “I had rather hoped you might when I locked you in.”

  “You . . . ,” said Liz, unable to articulate the rest of her thought and struggling to apologize to Peter with her eyes.

  “I suppose you’d like to see them,” said Peter, as calmly as if they had been discussing a simple business deal. He opened his satchel and reached in, gathering together the bulk of the documents and pulling them out.

  “Feel free to set them on the table,” said John, reaching into his jacket pocket. “And don’t think about going anywhere.” He withdrew a pistol and waved Peter toward the library table on which he had first examined the Pandosto. It hardly seemed possible that had been less than a week ago.

  “You locked us in?” said Liz, curiosity and anger mixed in her voice. “You dirty bastard.”

  “I’ve been kept quite busy the past couple of days trying to stay ahead of the two of you,” said Alderson. “Not everything has gone precisely to plan, but things worked out in the end—and you’ve brought me a nice little bonus.” He nodded toward the stack of documents.

  “But those don’t belong to you,” said Liz. “They don’t even belong to Thomas Gardner. Phillip Gardner left them to the descendants of his illegitimate son. We found his will.”

  “My dear, no one but you will ever see that will, and it’s common knowledge among several of the leading document dealers that I have an old family collection I’m ready to sell. I assure you there will be no question of ownership.”

  “But if you locked us in . . .” said Peter. “I mean, we thought that Thomas Gardner and Julia had . . .” Peter let his thought hang in the air.

  “My sister Julia? Yes, she was to have helped out but then that fool Gardner went and got himself an alibi at the worst possible time. Not that I actually trusted Gardner to do the dirty work for me, but he would have made a lovely scapegoat. That’s why I asked Julia to seduce him in the first place.”

  “So you knew about Thomas and Julia?” said Peter.

  “Of course I knew,” said Alderson. “It was my idea. Just as it was my idea to tempt you with the Pandosto. But you proved far too curious and steps had to be taken.”

  “So you’re the one who . . . .” said Peter.

  “I’m the one who killed Graham Sykes, ransacked this young lady’s office and apartment looking for his blasted book—yes, I did all of that. And if Thomas Gardner hadn’t shot himself, he would have taken the blame once Julia testified against him. Lucky for me you managed to leave a raft of evidence at the site of the murder. I should think it will be an open-and-shut case.”

  “I’ll testify for him,” said Liz, standing and taking a step toward Alderson.

  “That won’t be necessary,” said Alderson, turning the gun on her and motioning her back to her chair. “There’s not going to be a trial.” Liz sat back down, her face suddenly ashen.

  “Now,” said Alderson, turning to Peter. “I believe you have something else that belongs to me.”

  “The Pandosto,” said Peter.

  “My sister gave you a week to arrange for its sale. Your time is about up.”

  “It’s a forgery,” he said, “but then I guess you knew that or you would have taken it to Sotheby’s or Christie’s.”

  “Yes,” said John, “but it was so much easier to take it to you. I’d hoped that you had neither the resources nor the wit to prove it a fake. And of course your ego made you want to believe you’d found a great treasure. Am I wrong?”

  “Not entirely,” said Peter.

  “It’s a shame really. If you’d been a little less clever, some rich American would be drooling over the Pandosto, you and I would both be quite wealthy, and I wouldn’t be forced to become a three-time murderer and start all over with a new bookseller.”

  “A three-time murderer?” said Liz.

  “Well, I can’t very well let you two live, knowing what you know. When I tell the police that Graham Sykes’s murderer and his accomplice came after me in my own home, naturally they’ll have no qualms about my having defended myself. Shall we have a drink?” Alderson asked, waving his gun toward a cut-glass decanter. “I’m not entirely uncivilized.”

  Kingham, 1879

  As the servants packing Mrs. Gardner’s things banged and clattered unceasingly overhead, Phillip Gardner read again the letter that had brought an end to his marriage and to his hopes of saving Evenlode House from ruin. These losses paled, however, next to the pain that welled in his chest every time he read the words that swam before him. He realized only now that he could have lived with the shame of condemning the family estate to ruin, but to have first wronged and then lost the one woman he ever truly loved was more than he could bear.

  His triumph over Reginald Alderson now seemed childish, and the pain of losing Isabel was twinned with the shame he felt for his complicity in the destruction of a great treasure. Only now did it occur to him that he might have made two forgeries, returning one of them to Mayhew as the original while keeping the true Pandosto for himself. It was not out of greed that he wished he had thought of this plan earlier but out of a sudden and intense desire to preserve a great piece of literary history. But Phillip had been blinded by hatred and arrogance.

  As he read the words of Miss Prickett’s letter again and again, his course of action gradually became clear. Gathering together a few papers and books, he left the house by the kitchen door and made one last trek to the lair in which he had plied his craft as a forger. As he was entering the chapel, Mrs. Gardner was stepping into the trap that would bear her to the railway station. They would never see each other again.

  —

  In the waning light of a short November day, Benjamin Mayhew strode down Piccadilly toward St. James’s Street and dinner with William Smith at his club. He had disposed of the Pandosto, and though he knew it could have brought him fame, it might equally have brought him ruin and notoriety—he had, after all, stolen the book to begin with. It was technically not even his book anymore; he had provided Phillip Gardner with a bill of sale.

  Only he and Gardner knew the truth about the Pandosto, and Benjamin thought perhaps he ought to write down the whole story of the book and what it really did reveal, just in case anything were to happen to him. If he did, he would of course contrive for the secret to be kept until after the death of William Smith.

  Thus preoccupied with his thoughts, Mayhew stepped off the curb into Haymarket imagining the surprise of some future scholar’s discovering that the famous Pandosto forgery was copied from a genuine relic. The image was strong enough in his mind to blot out the sound of approaching hooves, and it might rightly be said of Benjamin Mayhew that as he was struck down by the cab, he had no idea what had hit him.

  —

  As Benjamin Mayhew breathed his last on the stones of Haymarket, Phillip Gardner hoisted himself up through the hole in the floor o
f the family chapel, using the rope he had lowered into the darkness a few hours earlier. He had made his final preparations. He was proud of the way he had applied his artistic abilities to the job of carving an appropriate inscription on his tomb in the crypt. He had then sealed his collection of documents, along with his confession and letters from Isabel and Miss Prickett, in that vault. His tomb would remain otherwise empty. Let it be a monument to foolishness, he thought, an empty tribute to what happens to a man who places money over love, rivalry over integrity, forgery over reality.

  It had taken him only an hour to put the finishing touches on the Pandosto. At the bottom of the list of owners’ names, he made two additions. The first, he saw as an insurance policy. Should the Pandosto come to the attention of scholars, he wanted to direct them toward Mayhew, in hopes that the bookseller might admit that, but for Phillip’s lone addition, the marginalia were copied from Shakespeare’s own hand. So he added the inscription, “B. Mayhew for William H. Smith.” Under this, he wrote in pencil and in his own hand, “B.B. / E.H.” Though it would be meaningless to most people, to Reginald Alderson it would serve as a reminder of who had tricked whom.

  Phillip hoped Mayhew would forgive him for the change of plans, but he knew from experience that private anguish could be more painful than public humiliation, and he wanted Alderson to know the extent to which he had been duped. Alderson would have one night of joy, when he found the Pandosto on his library table; tomorrow morning that would all be shattered with the delivery of Phillip’s final letter. Should Alderson ever be foolish enough to reveal the Pandosto to the public, Smith would still get to have his laugh at the Stratfordians, but Phillip no longer cared about making Mayhew or Smith happy.

  —

  Before he made his surreptitious deliveries to Evenlode Manor, Phillip had returned to his only true loves—painting and Isabel. In only one hour he had created what he now knew to be his second masterpiece, and his only truly original work. He painted her as he remembered her best, brushing her hair before the mirror after they had made love. As he thought back on that glorious afternoon, it seemed to Phillip that that had been the only time in his life he had been truly happy. In summoning Isabel’s face once more and letting it flow from his memory through the brush and onto the paper, he felt, for the first and last time, what it meant to be an artist.

  For more than an hour after the paint was dry he stared at Isabel—the only face that had ever looked upon him with unconditional love, the face he had betrayed and banished.

  Even after he slipped the painting inside the book in which it would remain hidden in Alderson’s library, after he slid the false grave marker that hid the entrance to the crypt back into place, Phillip still saw that face. He hoped his painting might eventually see the light of day—not so he would be remembered, but so his blessed Isabel might once again smile upon some lucky soul years hence.

  The house was silent when he returned, the servants gone with their mistress, for they knew who paid their wages. Rain had just begun to fall as Phillip climbed from a window of the main house onto the top of a wall of the unfinished west wing. Three stories below, through the mist, he could see stacks of freshly quarried limestone—the final delivery of construction materials that had arrived just a few days earlier. Phillip wondered if Mrs. Gardner had paid the bill.

  Ridgefield, 1994

  Sitting in the waiting room at the hospital hour after hour while Amanda underwent a battery of tests, Peter felt more alone than ever. True, Sarah and Charlie Ridgefield were there, sitting together on the other side of the room, one of them occasionally standing and crossing to look out the window, but they did not speak—to each other or to Peter—and Peter felt that they blamed him in some way for whatever had happened to Amanda. He knew rationally that this could not be true, that the idea of speaking before hearing the doctor’s verdict was as abhorrent to them as it was to him, but reason was not likely to win a battle against emotion today, and as time slowed to a glacial pace, Peter wracked his memory for what he could have done to make Amanda sick. He could not even look at Sarah and Charlie and so did not see when Amanda’s mother stood up and walked across the room. She slipped onto the sofa next to Peter and took his hand in hers without speaking. He still could not look at her, but he felt hot tears on his cheek as his emotions finally admitted what his reason had known all along—he was not alone.

  Sarah’s gesture of inclusion finally gave Peter the strength to do more than simply wait. From a pay phone in the corridor he called Cynthia.

  “I’ll be right there,” Amanda’s friend had said, and there was such sympathy and support and shared agony in those few words that Peter began to cry again.

  “Would you do one thing for me first?” he said.

  “Anything,” said Cynthia.

  “Would you stop by the house and bring me something?”

  An hour later a doctor finally emerged to speak with them. “We’re looking over the results of her MRI,” he said. “We won’t know anything conclusive for a little longer.”

  “What do you know that’s not conclusive?” said Charlie Ridgefield. “What do you suspect? What’s likely?”

  “I’d rather not speculate until we get the results back,” the doctor said.

  “If you think you’re sparing our feelings by not telling us what you’re afraid of, you’re not,” said Charlie, a hint of anger creeping into his voice. “We can’t possibly be more afraid than we are right now.”

  “She’s had quite a bit of pain medication and sedatives,” said the doctor, “so she’s a bit groggy. But I think it would be okay if one of you came back to see her.”

  Sarah reached for her purse, but Charlie laid a hand on her shoulder. “It should be Peter,” he said, and Peter knew then that his father-in-law didn’t blame him, hadn’t been trying to shut him out.

  “Come with me,” said the doctor.

  She was beautiful, Peter thought when he saw his wife lying in the hospital bed. She had been so pale that morning when Charlie had carried her into the emergency room, but her color had returned, and though he knew she would say her hair was a mess, Peter didn’t care. She was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. He sat beside her and it took a moment for her to focus on him and to whisper, “Peter,” and in those two syllables and in those eyes Peter saw it all—the girl sitting upright in the library reading room; the late-night talks in the snack bar; the tender lovemaking in the Devereaux Room; the trips to England, holding hands when the plane took off—in this beautiful woman he saw all that was good and right about his life.

  “You saved me, you know,” he said. “I never told you that before, but you saved me.”

  He was afraid she wouldn’t understand what he was talking about, but she smiled and whispered, “I know.” She slid a warm hand out from underneath the covers and said, “Hold my hand while I sleep.”

  Peter took her hand and watched her eyes close. Her breathing slowed and he leaned his head against her chest and listened to the sound of her heartbeat and prayed that the doctor would never come. He did not want to hear test results and a diagnosis and a survival rate, he wanted only to hold Amanda’s hand forever and listen to her heartbeat go on and on.

  —

  “We can’t make any promises about the surgery,” said Dr. Owen, “but there is some reason to be optimistic.” Peter was standing in a small consulting room with Sarah and Charlie and the neurosurgeon, who was pointing to a series of MRI images. They looked like modern art, was all Peter could think. Amanda would hate them.

  “With a tumor of this type, there are cases of complete recovery, but I have to warn you the five-year survival rate is only about ten percent.”

  “She’ll be in the ten percent,” said Charlie, pulling his wife into his embrace.

  “And of course there are risks of complications developing as a result of the surgery. Any time you cut into the br
ain you’re taking a chance.”

  For the second time in his life Peter steeled himself to deliver a diagnosis to Amanda, this time to tell her that she had brain cancer, that she would need to undergo several hours of surgery and several months of radiation, and that even then her chances of survival were not good. She was awake when he entered her room, looking more alert than she had on his last visit.

  “I have something for you,” he said. “Cynthia brought it.” He held out the copy of At the Back of the North Wind that he had bound for her eight years ago. Amanda always kept the book by her bedside, even when they traveled.

  “It’s so beautiful,” she said. “I think you won me with this book.”

  “Hank says I never did as good a job on a binding as I did on that one.”

  “That’s because this one was bound with so much love, you know that, Peter.” She clutched the book to her breast and Peter bit hard on his tongue to keep from crying. She had always been the strong one, but now he knew he would have to be her pillar of strength and he wasn’t sure he was up to the job.

  “I’ve got some news from the doctor,” he said.

  —

  Peter stayed in Amanda’s room that night, sleeping fitfully in the chair by the bed. Deep in the night he felt her touching his hand and he sat forward to look into her eyes in the dim light.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “Make love to me,” she said.

  “Are you crazy?” said Peter, stifling a laugh. “We’re in a hospital room.”

  “I know,” she said, pulling him toward her so hard that he had no choice but to rise out of his chair and lie on the edge of the bed. “But tomorrow they’re going to shave my head and cut a hole in my skull and then they’re going to spend six months shooting poison radiation at me, so I may not feel sexy for a while.”

  “But we can’t here,” said Peter, as she began to unbutton his shirt.