The Book of the Lion

The Book of the Lion

Thomas Perry

Dominic Hallkyn played back the voicemail on his telephone while he took off his sport coat and hung it up to dry in the laundry room. The smell of rain on tweed was one that he knew some people might say was his smell, the smell of an English professor. The coats—tweed or finer-spun wool in the winter and seersucker or summer-weight fabrics in the late spring and early fall—were his work uniform, no different from a mechanic's coveralls. He wore them to repel the skepticism of the young.

The first couple of calls were routine: a girl in his undergraduate medieval lit course had been sick, so could she please hand her paper in tomorrow? Of course. He had plenty of others to deaden his soul until that one arrived. Meg Stanley, the Department Chair, wanted him to serve on a Ph.D. oral exam committee. Unfortunately, he would. Reading the frantically scribbled preliminary exam and then asking probing questions in the oral would be torment to him and the student, both of them joined in a ritual of distaste and humiliation, all of it designed to punish them both for their love of literature, but it was part of his job.

The last call was not routine. “Professor Hallkyn. I know you are considered one of the two or three best living experts on medieval English literature.” In spite of Hallkyn's contempt for academics who fancied themselves the best or the most famous, he was irritated at the “two or three.” The two were Hallkyn, and Bethune, who was at Harvard. Who did this man think was the third? So when he heard the next sentence, he was already in a bad humor. “I have
The Book of the Lion
. It's written in a fine court hand on thin vellum, legible in its entirety. I will be in touch.”

Hallkyn could feel his heart pounding in his chest, and yet he felt light-headed, as though he were being strangled. He realized after a moment that he had forgotten to breathe, and he placed both palms on the table to hold himself up while he corrected the oversight, taking a few deep breaths while he thought. Of course it was a hoax. Nobody could have
The Book of the Lion
.

The book didn't exist except as a reference in Chaucer's Retraction at the end of
The Parson's Tale
, where he listed all of his greatest works by name: “
The Book of Troilus
; also
The Book of Fame
;
The Book of the Five and Twenty Ladies
;
The Book of the Duchesse
;
The Book of Seint Valentynes Day of the Parlement of Briddes
;
The Tales of Canterbury
(thilke that sownen into synne);
The Book of the Leoun
; and many another book (if they were in my remembrance) and many a song and many a leccherous lay—that Crist for his grete mercy foryeve me the synne.”

Those colleagues who took the retraction seriously had always amused Dominic Hallkyn. He couldn't fathom how they could profess to know Chaucer and not notice that he had a wicked sense of irony. The Retraction wasn't a confession. It was an advertisement.

The thought brought him back to the tantalizing nature of what he had just heard. In his Retraction, Chaucer did not list everything he had written. He listed only masterworks. He listed only those poems that six centuries later still made up a fair portion of the reason that anyone cared about Middle English literature. He listed them in an order ascending to his sublime achievement,
The Canterbury Tales
. And then, after that, he listed one more work by name, and only one—
The Book of the Lion
.

Chaucer, first of the big three of English— the one from whom Shakespeare learned his true trade, not plays but deep understanding of human beings, and from whom Milton learned to write poetic narrative—was the one who wrote when the language itself was still in its childhood and could be exercised by one writer to grow into its mature strength. And what if, contrary to what everyone had thought for over half a millennium, a copy of
The Book of the Lion
had survived?

Dominic Hallkyn thought, and like any thinking man, he drank. He sat in his library on the leather couch near the 18th-century writing desk, staring past it at the wall of bookshelves. And because he was in a place that was the physical embodiment of his mind, his eyes knew where to focus. He looked at the fifth shelf, where Geoffrey Chaucer resided. There was the familiar Donaldson edition of 1975; the Blake edition including the corrections from the fragmentary Hengwrt Manuscript; the Fisher, with its generous supporting materials and critical essays. And a special purchase from his own graduate school days, the seven-volume Skeat edition of 1899. And because Hallkyn loved the twenty-three painted pictures, including the one of Chaucer the pilgrim, he kept the facsimile of the Ellesmere Manuscript at the end of the row.

Hallkyn drank a single malt scotch that tasted to him like the breath of the British Isles, its rich peat and wet moss and damp air and time. He considered the slim likelihood that there was going to be a second chapter to this experience, and then he made a telephone call.

The call was to the private number of a man named T.M. Spanner. Spanner's personal number was sought-after, a number that powerful men carried in their wallets on small pieces of paper with no notations written beside it. Spanner's wealth was old and hard to trace—it was reputed to have come originally from one of his ancestors inventing the tool that Americans perversely called a wrench, although its true name in English was spanner. But even when Hallkyn had met T.M. Spanner as an undergraduate at Yale, he was already the sort of man who stimulated curiosity. The imagination was always ready to supply speculation and wild stories.

Hallkyn heard the answer, “T.M. Spanner,” and the voice impressed him again. He had an accent that retained a trace of the south, a slower Virginia tidewater cadence that had somehow survived the years of northeastern prep schools and universities. The voice conveyed the conviction that the man had the ownership papers in his back pocket to the ground beneath his feet, the air he breathed, and all the things he could see from where he stood.

“T.M.,” said Hallkyn. “It's Dominic.”

“Herr Doktor Professor,” said Spanner. “It's always a pleasure to hear your voice.”

Hallkyn hoped that it was a pleasure. If so, it could only be because, unlike most people who called Spanner, Hallkyn was not in any business, and didn't want Spanner's advice, his help, or his endorsement. What he and Spanner always talked about was what had drawn them together thirty years ago—books. “You too, T.M. I hope I'm not bothering you.”

“Not at all. I'm sitting at home looking at a television show. I hesitate to say watching, because that implies that I'm actually following along. I have the sound off and I'm gazing at a pretty moving picture of the Alps. What's new with you, Dom?”

“Until a few minutes ago, not much. I've got to tell you, I got a message on my phone that set off a lot of emotions.”

“What? You're not sick or something, are you?” There was genuine concern in Spanner's voice.

“No, nothing like that. This isn't even personal. It's intellectual. Literary and historical. A man who didn't identify himself called and said he has
The Book of the Lion
.”

“
The Book of the Lion
,” Spanner repeated. “The Retraction.”

“Yes,” said Hallkyn. “That's right. When Chaucer apologizes for the sin of writing his greatest works, it's the last one in the list.”

“Hold on a second, Dom. I think I see my old
Canterbury Tales
on a shelf right now. Hold on. It's not more than fifty feet away.”

Hallkyn heard the phone click on a hard surface. He was experiencing again who T.M. Spanner was. He was a man of the financial world, and that meant politics and manufacturing and trade and the shrewd application of power, but he had also studied literature with a sincere appreciation and humility. He was at once a man who could own a library where “only fifty feet away” was nearby, and a man who
would
own a library that size, and know where everything was. Hallkyn heard him pick up the phone again. Hallkyn said, “It's at the end, after
The Parson's Tale
.”

“Got it,” said Spanner. “Oh, yes. ‘
The Tales of Canterbury
thilke that sownen into synne;
The Book of the Leoun
, and many another book … and many a song and many a leccherous lay.' And
The Book of the Lion
has never been found, right?”

“Right. This person who called me claims to have a copy on thin vellum in a fine court hand, legible throughout.”

“Do you think it's possible?” said Spanner.

“I doubt it,” he said. Then he added, “But it's happened before. People find things, incredible things.”

“What is it that you want me to do?”

“I don't know,” said Hallkyn.

“That sounds a little disingenuous,” Spanner said. “You called an old friend who is probably also the richest man you know.”

“I'm sorry,” said Hallkyn. “I didn't mean it to sound that way. I want help of some kind, but I don't know what I need yet. I haven't known about this for more than a few minutes. I had to tell somebody, and this isn't the kind of thing you can tell just anybody. I need an old friend who understands the problem to puzzle this out with me—one who has lived a different sort of life, who can probably smell a fraud coming better than I can. This man— this voice—called me, and said he had the book. Maybe he's crazy or a hoaxer or a dupe. But maybe he has the most precious lost manuscript in history.”

“You got this voice on a phone message?”

“Yes. He said he had it, but not who he is, or where he is, or what he plans to do with it. Part of me wishes he'd call someone else— and maybe he already has. He might have called Gerald Bethune, and that pompous bastard is scratching his head now.” He paused. “I guess what I really wish is that this man really has the genuine ‘
Book of the Leoun
,' in a fair court hand on the finest thin vellum, legible in its entirety. That's what he says he has. And I hope he called me because he wants to know which institution I think he ought to donate it to.”

Spanner said, “I take it that's not what you believe is going to happen.”

Dominic Hallkyn swirled his glass, and watched the amber liquid move around, staring into its deep glow. “Libraries and museums all over the world are full of things that people gave them,” he said. “I've seen great acts of generosity, not the least of them from you. I've also seen acts of selfishness and deceit that I would not at one time have imagined. I don't know which this is.”

“Or something in between?” said Spanner. “A simple sale?”

“Yes. That too,” said Hallkyn. “Or an undergraduate prank. It might be fun to hire some old bar character to call your professor. For the price of a drink you could talk forever about how the mere mention of a long-lost Chaucer poem made the professor's hands shake.”

“Maybe,” Spanner said. “So let's get practical. How should we handle this?”

“We should think it through, so we're prepared for the next stage before anything happens. We should expect to wait a long time for the next call, and then when it doesn't come, to forget the whole thing. That way, we won't be pining forever for something that was never possible.”

“And if the call comes?” said Spanner.

“Then we must be fully ready to guide events in the direction we want them to go.”

And in what direction do we want to push?” Spanner asked.

“Maybe I can talk him into giving it to a university, or to a trust, or to the British government, or to the Huntington Library in California. They have the Ellesmere manuscript.”

“If he's wealthy, he would be able to write the value of it off against his income for tax purposes,” Spanner said. “It might be worth more than he could get for it on the market.”