The Book of Air and Shadows

by Michael Gruber

  But as soon as he had this thought, he brightened and drew his cell phone from his pocket. He checked his watch. Not eleven yet. At eleven his mother watched the Tonight Show and would not answer the phone during that hour to hear of the Apocalypse, but now she’d be in her lounger with a book.

  “It’s me,” he said when she answered.

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m in Red Hook, at Carolyn Rolly’s place.”

  “She lives in Red Hook?”

  “It’s gentrifying, Ma.”

  “It’s dockies and gangsters. Why is a classy girl like that living in Red Hook?” Mrs. Crosetti had met Carolyn on several occasions, at the shop, and delivered this assessment to her boy afterward, with the implication, like a thrown brick, that if he had any sense, he would put on some moves. She resumed, with a hopeful note, “And how come you’re there? You got something going with her.”

  “I don’t, Ma. It’s the fire. She had to work on some heavy books at her place-she’s kind of an amateur bookbinder-and I helped her carry them over here from the city.”

  “And you hung around after.”

  “We ate. I’m just about to leave.”

  “So I shouldn’t rent the hall. Or alert Father Lazzaro.”

  “I don’t think so, Ma. Sorry. Look, why I called…do you know anything about seventeenth-century watermarks, or Jacobean secretary hands? I mean how to decipher them?”

  “Well, for the secretary hand, that would be Dawson and Kennedy-Skipton, Elizabethan Handwriting, 1500-1650. It’s a manual, although I understand there’s some good stuff on the Web, more like interactive tutorials. For the watermarks, there’s Gravell…no, wait, Gravell starts at 1700; just a second, let me think…oh, right, it’d be Heawood, Watermarks Mainly of the 17th and 18th Centuries. What’s this about?”

  “Oh, we found some old manuscript in the covers of a book she wants to repair. I’d like to find out what it is.” He wrote the references down on a Visa counterfoil from his wallet.

  “You should talk to Fanny Doubrowicz at the library. I’ll call her for you if you want.”

  “No, thanks. It’s probably not worth her time until I know if it’s not just an old shopping list or something. Part of it, some pages, are in a foreign language.”

  “Really? Which one?”

  “I can’t tell. A funny one, anyway, not French or Italian-more like Armenian or Albanian. But that could just be because I can’t really read the script.”

  “Interesting. Good. Anything to keep that brain working. I wish you’d go back to school.”

  “Ma, that’s what I’m doing. I’m saving money to go to school.”

  “I mean real school.”

  “Film school is real school, Ma.”

  Mrs. Crosetti said nothing, but her son could well imagine the expression on her face. That she herself had not settled down to what became her profession until she was years older than he was now did not signify. She would have helped him pay for serious grad school, but making movies? No, thank you! He sighed and she said, “I got to go. You’ll be home late?”

  “Maybe real late. We’re interleaving wet books.”

  “Really? Why don’t you use a vacuum? Or just send them to Andover?”

  “It’s complicated, Ma. Anyway, Carolyn’s in charge. I’m just the help.” He heard music faintly in the background and applause, and she said good-bye and hung up. It never failed to astonish him that a woman whose profession had given her an immense store of knowledge and who typically finished the Times Sunday crossword in twenty-two minutes could waste her time watching a celebrity gabfest and listen to a moderately talented comedian tell a skein of leaden topical jokes, but she never missed an evening. She said it made her feel less lonely at night, and he supposed that lonely people were in fact the main audience for such shows. He wondered if Rolly watched the Tonight Show. He had not seen a television in the place. Maybe vampires didn’t get lonely.

  Crosetti rose from the terrible chair and stretched. Now his back ached too. He checked his watch and walked the length of the loft to where Rolly was still bent over her tasks.

  “What?” she said as he drew near.

  “It’s time to change the blotter. What’re you doing?”

  “I’m putting the cover of volume four back together. I’m going to have to completely replace the covers on volumes one and two, but I think I can get the stains out of this one.”

  “What’re you using to replace the manuscript pages as backing?”

  “I have some contemporary folio scrap.”

  “Just happen to have it around, eh?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact,” she snapped back. “There’s a lot of it available from books broken for their maps and plates. Who were you talking to on the phone?”

  “My mom. Look”-he gestured to the walls of bookcases-“do you happen to have a book about watermarks? I have a reference…” He reached for his wallet.

  “Well, I have Heawood, of course.”

  Unfolding the counterfoil and smiling: “Of course. How about Dawson and Kennedy-Skipton?”

  “That too.”

  “I thought you weren’t a paleographer.”

  “I’m not, but Sidney asked me to take a course on incunabula and early manuscripts and I did. Everyone in that field uses D & K-S.”

  “So you can read this stuff?”

  “A bit. It was some years ago.” Here again he heard a tone creep into her voice that discouraged probing.

  “Can I take a look at those books after we do the interleaving?”

  “Sure,” she said, “but early secretary hand is a bear. It’s like learning to read all over again.” They changed the blotters and then she extracted the two books from her shelves. She went back to work at her table and he sat down with the guidebooks at the spool table.

  It was a bear. As the foreword to D & K-S has it, “The Gothic cursive hands of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries in England and elsewhere in Europe are among the hardest to read of all the scripts normally considered by paleographers.” Crosetti learned that the contemporaries of Elizabeth and James I made no distinction between n and u, or u and v or i and j, nor did they dot their is. S appeared in two different forms, and r in four, and there were strange ligatures tying h and s and t to other letters, distorting the shapes of each. They punctuated and spelled as they pleased, and to save expensive parchment they had invented dozens of incomprehensible abbreviations, which had remained in common use even when paper came in. Doggedly, however, he applied himself to the exercises provided by the manual, starting with Sir Nicholas Bacon’s An Exhortacion gyuen to the Serieaunts when they were sworne in the Chauncery in Anno domini 1559. By the time he had reached line three, checking nearly every word against the translation provided, it was well past midnight. Rolly was still at her task, and he thought that if he could just rest his eyes and his aching back for a few moments he would get a second wind. He slipped off his sneakers and lay down on one edge of the pallet.

  Then there was a weird clatter sounding in his ear. He sat upright with a curse and grappled in the bedclothes until he had the source of it in hand: an old-fashioned alarm clock, the kind they draw in cartoons, with twin bells and a clapper on top and a wide white face, and Carolyn had taped the bells so that when the thing went off it would not awaken her as well, a typically elegant low-tech solution. He shut it off and saw that there was a note affixed to it with a bit of ribbon:

  Your turn; I did the last two myself.

  It was written on a slip of heavy antique paper in black ink, the hand an elegant italic. Crosetti’s violent annoyance instantly evaporated. He examined the deeply breathing shape in the bed next to him. He could see a shock of hair on the pillow, an ear, a curve of downy cheek. Cautiously, he leaned over and placed his face close to this, mere inches away. He breathed in long and deep and got soap, some kind of shampoo, a note of glue and old leather, and underneath this something more personal, eau de girl. Crosetti was no stran
ger to the delights of women, specializing in those that liked nice guys rather than the type (more numerous, in his experience) that preferred the other kind, nor was he even sure he particularly liked this woman. No, actually, he was sure he did not, and also sure that never in his life had he obtained an erotic charge as powerful as the one he now received, sniffing absurdly at the skin of Carolyn Rolly.

  Incomprehensible, but there it was. He peeked under the duvet and found that she was wearing a dark T-shirt. He could just make out the little knobs of her spine bulging the thin fabric. Below that, dim whiteness. He had to know, and so he reached out and touched her, barely touched her haunch with the back of his hand, and felt tight, sheer fabric; a shock like an electric current flowed up his arm; she stirred and murmured.

  He was out of the bed in a flash, and stood there feeling a jerk, with (could it be?) his knees actually trembling and his penis turgid. Holy shit, he said to himself several times, and then Uh-uh, no thank you, this is not happening. He marched like a soldier to the sink, where he drenched his face with cold water. He wished he could take a shower, but there was none, nor any bath either. An image of the occupant standing nude on a towel dabbing at her body with a warm sponge suddenly inhabited his mind. He forced it away by an act of will and started on the changing of the blotters.

  After which he found himself with a couple of hours to kill before the next change, scheduled for 5 a.m. Briefly he considered poking through Rolly’s things, checking out her underwear, her pharmaceuticals, her papers. He let this notion play for a while on his interior TV, and then dismissed the idea. The point was not to penetrate more deeply into whatever weird shit she had going on but to finish this stupid project and escape. Thus the mature Crosetti lectured Crazy Al, a new person who was dying to dive back under that duvet and yank Carolyn Rolly’s panties down, or failing that, gather sufficient material to become a successful stalker.

  But he did explore the kitchen and found in a cabinet (constructed of the ever-present pallet boards) a package of sugar cookies and one of those tin boxes of flavored instant coffee, hazelnut in this case, that he often saw in racks in the supermarket, when he often wondered who bought that crap. Now he knew. He boiled water in a pan and made the disgusting brew and drank it down for the caffeine’s sake, and ate all the cookies, which were stale and like sweet gypsum in the mouth. On the evidence of her larder, Rolly obviously preferred live prey.

  Somewhat pumped up now from the coffee and the sugary snack, Crosetti reset the alarm for five o’clock and renewed his investigation into the old papers. Before half an hour passed he was convinced that either he was going crazy or that the eighteen sheets marked by the post horn watermark were all in a language he did not know, or in some code…no, not code, cipher. Well, well, that might be interesting. The four crown-marked sheets, in a different and easier hand, appeared to be some sort of religious screed:

  Worldly tears fall to the earth but godly tears are kept in a bottle. Judge not holy weeping superfluous. Either sin must drown in them or the soule burn

  He wondered briefly which kind Rolly had wept, and then put these pages aside. He was much more interested in the twenty-six sheets marked with a coat of arms, which were in the same hand as the ones written in the odd language. Within minutes he was gratified to discover that these were obviously in English. He could pick out the familiar short words-of, and, is, and the like-and after a while he located the beginning of the manuscript, or at least he thought it was the beginning. There was an inscription on the upper right, above the body of the text, the date 25th Octobr. Anno. Dom. 1642, and the place, Baubnmy. No, that couldn’t be right, or maybe it was Welsh, or…he examined the text again, and suddenly something clicked and he saw it was Banbury. Crosetti felt an odd thrill, akin to his delight when his film editing was going well, the emergence of meaning out of the raw stuff. It was a letter, he soon discovered, from a man named Richard Bracegirdle to his wife, called Nan, and not just a letter, but a final letter, and a…Crosetti knew there was a word for this sort of statement but could not recall it. Bracegirdle seemed to have been mortally wounded in a battle, although Crosetti had as yet no idea where the battle was fought, which contestants fought there, or in what war. Like many Americans, he had only the sketchiest idea of European history. What was going on in 1642? He’d look it up, and would have done so immediately, except that a computer with broadband access was another thing that Rolly lacked. He finished the first page and picked up the next; it had a signature on it, so was clearly the last page of the letter. He began it anyway, for the pages were unnumbered and there was no way of putting them in order without first reading them.

  So he plowed on, line by line, slowly increasing his facility at translating Bracegirdle’s hand. And there came at last a moment when Crosetti realized that he was reading the text somewhat more easily, and that the long-dead soldier was as alive to him as any chat room correspondent. The thrill redoubled at this realization, and the romance of paleography struck him like a blow: no one else knew this! No human being had read these lines for over three and a half centuries, perhaps no one had ever read them except for Bracegirdle and his wife. It was like looking out a rear window in an apartment building and observing some intimate act in the domestic life of strangers.

  Some more thinges of import for my time groweth short I can scarce make out the page though it be clare day & I am griped by my mortal agonie you know well my leathern boxe that I keep in my privy closet, in it you shall finde the letteres cypher’d in the fasioun I devized. Doe you keepe them safe and show them to no one. They tell all the tale nearlie of my Lord D. his plot & oure spyeing upon the secret papist Shaxpure. Or so wee thought him although now I am lesse certayne. In that manner & bent of lyfe he wase a Nothinge. But certayne it is hee wrought the playe of Scotch M. I commanded of him in the Kinges name. I find it passing strange that all though I am dead and him also yet the playe lives still, writ in his own hande & lying where onlie I know & there maye it reste for ever.

  Crosetti was so intent on deciphering each word into English sense that he missed it the first time through and it was only upon rereading this section that the connection between Shaxpure and playe actually penetrated his mind. He froze, gasped, cursed; sweat popped out on his back. He stood staring at Bracegirdle’s squiggles, expecting them to fade away like fairy gold, but they stayed put: Shaxpure, playe.

  Crosetti was a cautious fellow, and tight with a buck, but he occasionally picked up a lottery ticket, and once he had sat in front of his TV and watched the girl pull the numbered Ping-Pong balls out of the drum and followed the numbers on his ticket and let out a whoop when the numbers matched. But his mother had come in at the sound and informed him that where the winning number needed 8-3, his ticket read 3-8. Actually, he’d never won anything in his life, had never really expected to, had grown up a fairly happy kid from a working family with no sense of entitlement at all, and now this.

  Crosetti was no scholar, but he had at least been an English major, and had done Shakespeare in his junior year. So he understood that what he held in his hands was a colossal find. Shakespeare (for he also knew that the man’s name could be spelled in a vast number of ways) had not to his knowledge ever been the subject of an official government investigation. And for papism! What, if any, religion William Shakespeare had espoused continued as one of the big questions in the field, and if some official contemporary had believed it…and who was this Lord D.? For that matter, who was Richard Bracegirdle? And the cherry on top was the mention of a manuscript of one of the plays, extant at least until 1642. Crosetti tried to think what play it might be that was “commanded of him in the Kinges name.” Oh, God! Why hadn’t he paid more attention in that class? Wait a second! Something to do with King James, some noble had tried to kill him in a Scottish castle, and witchcraft, something in a BBC documentary he’d watched with his mother on TV. He grabbed his cell phone-no, still too early to call-maybe Rolly-no, he didn’t want to think wha
t she’d be like awakened at ten to five with a question about…

  And just like that it popped into his mind. Shakespeare’s company, the King’s Players, had wanted a Scottish play to compliment the new king, and refer to his narrow escape, and flatter his ancestral connection, Banquo, and pander to the peculiar monarch’s obsession with witchcraft, and the house playwright had come up with Macbeth.

  Crosetti now recalled the necessity of respiration. He gasped. He knew there was nothing in Shakespeare’s hand but a few signatures and some suspect lines in a manuscript of a play that he supposedly worked on. No autograph on any play of his existed, none. The possibility that an autographed Macbeth was still buried in an English cellar somewhere…it boggled the mind. Crosetti knew a little about manuscript prices and he could extrapolate. It was too immense to consider; Crosetti could not wrap his head around it and so he simply stopped thinking about the possibility. But even the thing in his hands now, the Bracegirdle ms. plus what might be a ciphered account of the investigation of William Shakespeare for recusancy, would be enough to send him to film school. Film school! It’d do that and fund his first movie as well…

  Assuming always that the eighteen sheets of thin paper with the post horn watermark were in fact the secret letters Bracegirdle mentioned-and these ciphered English rather than a foreign language. Everything depended on the tidy heiress theory again: papers from the same stack of waste at the bindery being used in sequence to stuff the volumes of the Voyage. He spread out one of the sheets and examined it through the magnifying glass.

  Ptuug u kimn lf rmmhofl

  Or maybe not. Maybe that first series of characters was Ptmmg or Ptmng. He found it impossible to derive even the actual ciphertext accurately, because deciphering secretary hand depended so much on context, on knowing what English word was meant. Or at least it was for him. He imagined that the original recipient was familiar enough with Bracegirdle’s hand to read the ciphered letters and actually decipher it into plaintext. Crosetti knew little about ciphers except what he had picked up from movies, spy novels, and television. He knew what a ciphertext message was supposed to look like: equal blocks of five or six letters or numbers marching across the page. This didn’t look like that at all. It looked like regular writing, with “words” of differing length. Maybe that was how they wrote cipher in Jacobean times. He knew nothing of that subject, yet by analogy with other technical progress, such a cipher must have been fairly primitive. As he considered this, he recalled the difference between a cipher and a code. A code required a code book, or a memorized list of words that meant something other than what it appeared to be. But then it would have looked more like plain English, something like “the parson failed to buy the pig” might mean “the subject suspected of hiding a priest.” And that would limit what an intelligencer could relate. No, he simply knew that this was cipher; indeed, Bracegirdle had called it a cipher in his final letter.